Genesis
by MargaritaDaemonelix
Summary: What's left waiting at the end of time, for the being who can run from time at a whim?
1. Prelude

GENESIS

By MargaritaDaemonelix

**PART 1: ADD**

1\. _Seven_

[VIOLENCE] [DEATH]

2\. _Eight_

[VIOLENCE] [DEATH]

3\. _With the Samanas_

[VIOLENCE] [DEATH] [SMALL CHILDREN]

4\. Interlude: _Anger_

5\. _Fifteen_

[VIOLENCE] [DEATH] [SEXUAL INTIMACY]

6\. _Sixteen_

[SLIGHTLY GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION OF BLOOD] [VIOLENCE] [DEATH]

7\. _By The River_

[VIOLENCE] [DEATH] [SMALL CHILDREN] [ILLNESS] [SUICIDE]

8: Interlude: _Grief_

9\. _Twenty-one_

[VIOLENCE] [DEATH]

10\. Interlude: _Falling_

**PART 2: ARA**

[_REDACTED_]

* * *

_"For a long time, the wound continued to burn."_

_\- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse_


	2. 1: Seven

In the beginning, there was light.

No, no, that's not quite it. Add falls and he falls and he falls again, but it never starts with light. He thinks back to his childhood, to the stories his mother told, to the Elrian bible lessons. He falls further down. He thinks farther back. It never starts with light.

In the beginning, there was nothing, and thus, as he falls, Add is nothing.

"You're going to want to die," Glaive says, mocking and shrill as he tends to be. Unfortunately, Glaive has never been a good mentor in these kinds of things. "If the time sickness doesn't get to you first, then Seven Tower will. You know you won't live to see a full life."

"I've never wanted to live out a full life," Add argues, and swings his fist towards the voice. It doesn't connect with anything. He keeps falling. "I just want to live a happy one."

Glaive is laughing again. "Well, then," he says, "good fucking luck. You'll need it."

Add just keeps falling.

* * *

Elsword is roasting tonight's dinner over the fire when it starts to rapidly cloud over.

At first, he's ready to abandon camp and move everyone indoors, because there's no way Rena can control a runaway tornado with her magic, but then he sees the fissure. A dark crack opens up over the camp, and then a bundle of boy and time tumbles out and splatters against the ground.

As Elsword watches in horror (and slight awe), the boy shakes himself off and winces and grips his eyepatch like falling somehow caused his eye immense pain. He staggers to his feet and stumbles into the circle by the fire, where he—

"Please," the stranger gasps, gripping Eve by her shoulders, shaking her, trying to strangle her with fingers made of melting ice, "please, I just want- I just want to live, I just want-"

Eve does not bat an eye, even though all their friends have leapt to their feet with their weapons in hand and the stranger continues to to plead with her for mercy. Eventually, he just collapses in a weak clump at her feet. Rena cautiously lowers her bow, letting her arrow dissipate, and gasps when she turns the boy over and sees the eyepatch weeping black tears. "I don't know who he is," she says, "but he needs medical attention right now."

Elsword drops his sword and looks up. The dark clouds overhead have all blown away, and the skies are clear once more, revealing a glowing, blood red sunset.

"Huh," he says. "Didn't expect hobos to start dropping out of the sky at this hour."

* * *

The boy's name is Add. He gives little other information. While everyone is wary at first because of what he did (what he could have done) to Eve, he offers an explanation: he is a traveler from a different Elrios, and in his world, the Nasod were a weaponized race led by a tyrannical ruler. In his Elrios, there are a million units just like Eve who would tear him apart without batting an eye.

(It's so easy to lie, it's so easy to lie, _it's so easy to lie—_)

It's easier to forgive him for the little blunder after he takes to the battlefield, though. Add fights with lightning and anger and flickers of dark energy, different from what they've seen from the demons and Henir's forces alike. He commands his energy-generating prisms (dynamos, he calls them) from a distance, preferring to fight with his gadgets rather than his hands. It's effective and speaks to his strengths, as close-quarters combat is completely out of the question for him.

Forgiveness is simple. Trust is not.

Raven is the first to voice his concerns, and honestly, why wouldn't he? His nightmares are deeply rooted in betrayal, even to this day. He comes to Elsword with his misgivings in quiet, sitting the boy down like he would a child.

"I understand that he's a good fighter," Raven says, knowing fully well that his friend knows who he's talking about, "and I know he's genuinely fighting against the demons, but I get a dangerous feeling from him. He doesn't feel safe."

And although Elsword is still young and inexperienced, he isn't naive. "I know," he says quietly. "The day he dropped from the sky, I thought a tornado was about to kick up. He uses some dangerous technologies we have practically no grasp over."

"Not to mention he tried to strangle Eve as soon as he dropped into our world," Raven mutters. Trust is not nearly as freely given as forgiveness, especially for a betrayed general.

Add fits into their clique with ease, though. It's like he was part of them all along, laughing at their jokes even though he clearly tries to mask himself as standoffish and cold. He helps them with their weapons and fights at their sides, and in return, they become his home, his family.

God knows he needs one.

* * *

"Your eye is badly damaged," Rena says gently, brushing the hair out of his face. "Can you still see through it?"

"Barely." Add squints, although it really doesn't do much. "That half of my vision is blurry and kind of dark."

Rena sighs and hands him the poultice she had been making. "As I suspected. You have advanced iritis, and it's heavily impacting your eyesight."

"What's iritis?"

"An inflammation of the iris. Yours is bad enough that it's starting to spread out into your sclera—the whites of your eyes." She helps him affix his eyepatch over the poultice, tying it around the back of his head snugly. "I don't have the exact medicines to stop it; I can only slow down the growth for now, until I can figure out the source." There's an odd kind of light in her eyes as she runs a motherly hand down the back of his hair. "Were you poisoned in some way? Jabbed by a scorpion?"

Shame washes over every corner of his being as he lowers his head and tries to find the words to speak. "My father implanted Nasod parts into my body when I was young." He scowls. "He wanted to turn me into a human superweapon."

"Hey, now." Rena tips his head up, gently, and tears begin to rise to his eyes as he remembers his mother (beloved, beloved mother) doing the same. "You are not responsible for your father's crimes, alright? In Elvish, we have a saying that translates roughly to _the burden of an ancestor may last a hundred generations, but the shame should only last one._ You're capable of doing more than he could have ever done."

"I know. It's just," and here he heaves a sigh, "sometimes, I don't know how I'm still here."

Rena purses her lips, like she's confused, or perhaps frustrated. "How so?"

"I can't die." Add knows this, has known it for several timelines already. "The time-sickness won't let me die. Not until I find what it is I'm looking for, apparently."

"Oh, Add." Rena pulls him into her arms warmly. Even though there's still space in her chest to breathe, Add feels stifled for other reasons entirely. "Time travel is a dangerous game. We called your folk the _atalante_, or the downfallen." Her breathing evens out from its frantic pace. "How many timelines are you at so far?"

"This is the seventh."

"What happened in the first?"

Add closes his eyes. "You all died, and I couldn't save you in time, so the next best thing was to leave for a new one."

She kisses his forehead; there lingers a feeling of spring that fades before he can even recognize it. "There is another word for the time traveler in my language," she says. "The _pel-umbar_. The fate-walkers. I hope you can walk onwards and take control of your own fate."

She leaves him with a small dose of herbs, to staunch the pain from his eye. He waits until she disappears into her tent, and then he washes them away in the river.

Addiction is hard to shake off, and quitting will be inevitably difficult when Rena leaves them too, this time.

* * *

"Do you practice fighting to destress as well?"

Add looks up from where he's scratching notes into the dirt with a stick. Ara stands there with her spear in hand, strong and upright like she's anchored to the earth. "When I was younger, I would destroy training dummies when I was angry," she reminisces. "My siblings teased and laughed, but even they knew to stay out of the way when the training dummy heads started to roll."

"How'd you know I've been training?" he asks, sticking his hands in his pockets. "It's not like I sent up some massive flare or anything." He scowls. "I made sure not to do that."

In response, Ara sweeps her foot across the dirt, kicking up a layer of practically lightning-fried dust. "You leave other trails behind," she says, "that last in other ways." She gestures widely across the clearing and the massive violet ripple wake he left. _Whoops._ "Sometimes, you leave behind the smallest impact that may make the greatest difference."

Add thinks of the butterfly effect that he's woven himself into, and scoffs. "Cool words." He watches as she begins to shuffle her spear through the dist, stirring up a faded lavender cloud. "Hey, hey, hey, what are you doing?"

"Preparing the field." A glowing orb of energy manifests in her hand; he looks away just before she drops it, spreading golden light over the dirt. When he dares to look again, the field is clean of the lightning streaks he left behind, and the soil is packed and firm once more.

Ara fights like a bird in flight—Add has always known this, but he's never watched her train before. While he sketches ideas into the dirt at his feet, Ara flies across the field, bouncing off trees and the ground and even wind currents, ducking from invisible enemies and non-existent weapons. Every move she makes is swift and sleek and graceful.

(He kinda envies her in that manner—the will to genuinely fight, to survive, has long escaped him.)

"How do you do it?" he asks when she finally lands, one foot skimming the ground before the other places itself delicately in front. "How can you keep fighting when the world is about to end?"

She tilts her head in curiosity at that. "What do you mean, when the world is about to end?" She gestures grandly around herself, like a princess surveying her broad lands. "I thought my world ended when Ran killed my family and abducted my brother in Fahrmann. Then I came here, and my world got a whole lot wider." Her eyes are so bright, so hopeful, so full of _light_. "There's never an end to any world, Add. Elrios may fall, but Empyrean is still intact, and so is Maple, and all the nations over the ocean."

"Yeah, but…" How can he explain it to her? _Oh, y'know, every single timeline I've been to has ended up falling to pieces. You're going to die a painful, miserable death._ "The war drags on. The world is dying. How can you be so _happy_?"

Ara just shakes her head and smiles again. "The world may be dying, but it's not _dead_ yet," she insists. "And I refuse to give up hope while it still lives."

Add watches as she sweeps the field with her Oriental magic again, cleansing it with a second bright orb of spirit energy. "Ciel will be cooking dinner shortly," she reminds him. "Please join us. You forget to eat too often. It's not good for you."

She leaves, and it's just Add in the lonely field again.

He sighs and goes back to sketching in the dirt.

* * *

The issue with constantly landing in war-riddled timelines is that Add is more on edge than all the rest of them combined. He jumps at the slightest sound, dynamos already whirring to life and ready to seek and destroy. Even though he knows it's futile, the time sickness won't let him go until he finds that one thing that makes him whole, and he might as well try to attain it. There are a hundred thousand ways any of them could die now, and he knows he's only delaying the inevitable, but at least he can try.

The sheer paranoia comes in handy when they nearly get ambushed, though. Everyone else is setting up camp when something rustles in the bushes, and though Elsword says it's probably just a lost phoru, Add approaches the bush cautiously with his dynamos on standby. The next moment, he's windmilling his arms through the air and falling as the incubus assassin slices cleanly through one of his dynamos with a wicked-looking scimitar.

Upon its destruction, though, the dynamo releases about two thousand volts of electric energy, which immediately jump up the scimitar's blade of cold and into the incubus's hand. The demon jitters from the energy, and immediately falls to the ground in the steaming heap, dead.

A few of the others squeak. "Okay, I'm sorry I doubted you," Elsword says, already on his feet with his eye wide. "Guys, Add's right, we're not safe here. We need to head out."

They pack up quickly, but Add just stays frozen where he landed on his butt beside the dead incubus. The halves of his dynamo are lying loose on the ground, everything down to the central microchip sliced in half by a blade of impeccable sharpness. He has a spare, but he'll have to make another dynamo soon to make up for the lost one. _Maybe if I salvage the parts…_

Eve wanders over, having finished her packing with the efficiency of any Nasod. He pays her no attention; he's already killed her once, twice, three times, for her parts before, after all. Her core means nothing if he has something much more powerful. "May I observe?" she asks, and he just gives half a nod and says nothing.

He pulls a jumble of wires out from inside the dynamo. Most of the damage is either superficial, or to the microchip. Thankfully, he's had the sense to make extras. While the group packs, he unravels the wires, strips the coating with his teeth, twists them back together, and installs the new microchip. The dynamo will still be effectively held together by spiderwebs until he can properly sit down and reseal everything, so he sticks it in his travel pack and configures his spare.

The last thing he remembers to do before they leave camp is to check on the incubus. The body is still intact, but he's not about to sully this earth with its blood. It's not like he has the weapon to do it, either.

Well.

He picks up the scimitar. The construction is both solid and refined, and expected of a high-ranking demon assassin. If the demons weren't so desperate, they wouldn't have sent out such a powerful pawn. They must be getting close to the stronghold, and the resonant thrum of demonic energy in the blade tells him as much.

Cold steel, however, is a powerful metal, and a technology long lost to the people of Elrios. It's lightweight, and easily supports multiple enchantments, unlike most iron and steel weapons. The only downside is that it's a lot more difficult to work with, thanks to its malleability. The fact that this scimitar has such a beautiful, efficient design means that it was worked at the hands of a master.

Add takes the scimitar. He'll ask Ain to say a blessing over it to dispel the cold burn from the demon influence, if the priest exists in this timeline. He may know nothing of swords, but another weapon couldn't hurt.

Now, he just needs to learn to use it.

* * *

Elesis offers to teach him the basics in sword fighting; she'd been a teacher for some time in Velder before joining her brother in travelling. She feels out the balance of the scimitar first by swinging it around and declares it "delicious!" before moving onto her lesson on stance and grip. She doesn't have a scimitar of her own, but has used a cutlass before, and, in her own words, "that's close enough".

"Point up, Add," she chides, twirling her branch around in a circle. He grimaces and lifts his own up. Since they don't have blunt practice swords, this is apparently the next best option. "Remember, you need to lead with your sword. It is an extension of yourself that you need to _extend_ for best results."

"My dynamos are extensions of myself," he complains, rolling his shoulder back. They're only on the first real lesson, and his arm is already irrevocably sore. "I don't just toss my dynamos out there!"

"Uh, yes, you do," Elesis snarks. "Chin up. Check your stance."

Add sighs, tips his chin up, and checks his stance. It's mediocre at best. He shifts his foot sideways to compensate.

"Excellent. Now, your scimitar uses mostly the outer edge. That means you'll have to backhand more often." She swings experimentally as an example. Add can literally hear the air _whoosh_ with the force of her swing. "Can you try that?"

"Um." He grips the branch, readies himself, and swings. The branch goes flying out of his hand and nearly hits Lu in the head. "Whoops. Sorry 'bout that."

Lu sticks her tongue out at him. "You'll get better with time," she cackles, before leaving to wash her face before bed.

"Well, that wasn't all that bad of a first try," Elesis reasons. "You had good stance right up until the moment the sword flew out of your hand, which is, honestly, better than I'd expected. You also didn't panic. I'd give it a solid, mmm, six out of ten."

"How do I make sure the sword doesn't just fly out of my hand every time I try to swing?" he asks, scowling. "The centripetal force practically _rips_ the sword out of my hand!"

Elesis holds her hands up defensively. "Okay, first of all, fancy words don't work on me. I dropped out of school at eleven to join the army. Second of all, you're using a literal _branch_. Your scimitar is balanced across the blade, so the centipede force isn't gonna be as bad. If you can master the branch, you can deal with a scimitar, easy-peasy."

"Centripetal," Add corrects with a grimace, but he goes to pick up his fallen branch nonetheless.

From her seat by the campfire, Ara raises her hand. "Um, Elesis, may I make a suggestion?" she requests. "If it makes sense, it might be better to train him in defensive maneuvers instead of offensive ones."

This is a remark that catches both Add and Elesis off guard. "What do you mean?" Elesis asks, curious. "Isn't the point of having a sword to fight with it?"

"Yes, but he has his dynamos," Ara argues. "Where I come from, the tradition is to use curved swords, but that is because I come from a clan of former horseback nomads. We were trained in the art of the bow, because it is long-ranged, and should our arrows fail us, only then will we draw our swords. Meanwhile, here in the south of the continent, you favour one-on-one combat."

Elesis's eyes light up. "Oh, you're right," she says. "A curved sword is less effective in a one-on-one fight against a straight sword. Unless you're riding a horse into battle, the scimitar isn't going to bag you any demons immediately. You'll be better off learning how to defend yourself in case any demons get past your dynamites."

"Dynamos," Add mumbles.

"Gah, you know what I mean." Elesis slugs him in the arm, and he squawks. "C'mon, arm up, keep your stance. Ara, you wanna come help?"

"I can try, but it's been a while." Ara grabs a branch of her own from the firewood pile and starts to strip off the twigs. "Alright!"

If anything, Add has to smile. It's his first genuine smile in six timelines.

Maybe things can get better.

* * *

There's thirteen of them, crowded behind the rocks like gnomes peering over a garden wall. Beyond this thin cover, there lies a cruel plain, its expanse only marred by the massive tower wreathed in flames. It stands sentinel over the land, hissing with ancient demonic energy.

It's a gruesome sight, and one that Add has seen all too recently as of lately.

Oh, sure, he's been here for nearly two months, but is that really anything when he's lived so many years across so many lives already? Although he barely looks a day over sixteen, his calculations tell him he's lived nearly twenty years. He looks like he's never been through anything nearly as horrific as he has.

Well, except for maybe the eyepatch.

There's no rush to get to the demons, though. Elsword is marking out a plan, one that will take them past the initial rock wall, across the plain, into the tower, and hopefully victorious out the other side. Add runs the odds quietly in his head. They aren't looking great.

"Question," Aisha says, raising her staff, "what do we do if we encounter something that we can't deal with? Like, remember Amethyst in Feita? You had a really bad time fighting those, and I couldn't deal with the charging glitters because of my leg injury."

"That's why we're going to stick together," Elsword says, more resolute than ever before. "Between all of us, we can cover each other's weaknesses. It's going to be tough, but I have faith in all of you." His eyes are shining in the dim light, like he's thirteen again and hasn't learned of the world's cruelty yet. "Let's make this count."

They all charge over the ridge, weapons in hand and ready to fight. Lu and Ciel fuse into one, the way they do when times are dire and they need to conserve energy to the extreme. Rena notches five arrows at once, holding her bow at her side as she runs. Chung slams his cannon into the ground to reload and sends out a blue gust of wind that rattles at everyone's ankles. Ain shatters his pendulum on the ground and lights up in fluorescent blue.

It's an impressive display, but Add knows it's futile. His calculations tell him that it's pointless to run, to hide, to fight; the It's just a matter of time.

_They don't know that_, he reminds himself, and plunges himself into the battle.

What's horrifying above all else is that the plains are virtually empty. Even though their team is still dressed in bright garb beneath all the mud and bloodstains, nothing seeks them out from across the field. There is just no life across the void before the tower, only bloodstained rocks where battles of millennia past were carried out.

"This isn't right," Lu yells, carried across the field on wings of sapphire, "this isn't _right_. There shouldn't be this much blood here. Where are all the Asmodean demons? Where have they gone?"

There's a thrum in the ground. Add can't quite put his finger on it, but it feels like the tower is laughing at them and their misfortunes, like a cruel reminder that they shouldn't be traipsing in these forgotten lands. Nevertheless, they push on, leaping off boulders and landing in the dark with no sense of direction aside from _onwards_.

"Lu, what is that thing?" Aisha shouts. She's taken to running instead of wasting her mana on teleporting. "It's massive!"

"We call it the Tower of Grief," Lu replies, never once taking her eyes off the distance. "Or sometimes the Tower of Crimson Flame. It i—it was once a massive military base. The Asmodean demons were commanded by Stirbargen, there's no way they could have fallen!"

"Not the tower," Elsword yells, "the _snakes!_"

Add looks up. He's never gotten this far with the El Search Party, so when he finally locks his gaze on the tower, it instantly jolts him awake.

Curling around the apex of the tower, like hideous, thorny vines, is a quartet of serpentine creatures, snarling like ancient machines that haven't quite learned to purr. Add hears them from far away, and decides that he's hopping out of this timeline as soon as he can.

"Miss Demon, how do we get to the top of that tower?" Ain asks, barely skimming the ground. "I suppose it would be a bit excessive to ask for a staircase."

"There is one, but it would take too long for us to ascend," Lu confirms. "Aisha, can you teleport us up there?"

"I can try," Aisha says, grimacing. "But it'll take a few tries to get up everyone up there, I can't take you all at once!"

"Then you take half, and I'll take half," Add says, reaching for his control panel. The others turn to him with matching confusion, and he only shrugs. "I can do it, okay? Don't ask."

Aisha scowls. "Alright, we'll head up." She mutters an incantation, slams her staff into the ground, and in an instant, half of them are gone in a flash of violet light. From above, the snarling turns to roars of aggression.

"We should go too, Add," Ara urges. "Quickly!"

They gather in on him, and the contact is _stifling_, but Add gathers up all his willpower, sets his dynamos to _transport mode_, and hits the button. There is, in no particular order, a painful buzz, a scream, and a flash of light; when Add opens his eyes again, one of the crimson dragon heads looms over him, hissing and spitting globules of acid.

Then Elesis brings her claymore down on its head, and the spell breaks. Add throws himself free from everyone else's grasp, and calls his dynamos back to battle mode. "Let's try this one!" he yells, swinging an arm out to direct them. The dynamos churn and crackle, generating an orb of electricity that violently drops down onto the dragon head, the gravity field dragging the beast down and slamming its head into the stone of the tower.

"Good thinking, Add!" Rena releases her shot: a single arrow shimmering with frost and ice that pierces the hide of the dragon and begins to spread. "Keep it down for as long as you can, we can kill it that way!"

As they watch in horror, though, flames lick at the edges of the frost, and as Add's gravity field runs out of electricity, the beast rears its head and howls at the sky. Patches of magenta light capture their groups, and it's only a matter of seconds before they have to scramble out of the way of massive arcane meteors that shake the tower on impact.

"What the fuck is this thing?" Add yells, skidding to a stop. "How do we even put a dent in it?"

"Very carefully, I'd presume." Eve raises her hand, and a void opens in the air above them, revealing one of her guardian Nasod. "Avoid the meteors as they approach."

Add bares his teeth and brings his dynamos close in again. "Thirty thousand volts," he seethes, as the gadgets begin to generate more and more electricity, "forty thousand! I need it all!"

This time, they whirl into a circle that tears open a crack in the timespace fabric. Who's to say Eve is the only one who can make good use of the interdimensional gap? He brings the dynamos down, and the continuum snaps like a guitar string, shockwaves rushing down in gravitational spheres to thunder down on the dragon's back.

From all around, everyone summons their strongest magic to wear the beast down, because there are still three left after this one, and they're not out of the woods yet. Rena fires a spectacular fan of arrows that home in on the dragon's skin and worm their way under its scales. Aisha slashes her staff downwards as she chants from her book, dropping her own meteors on its back. Rose kneels on the ground, firing round after round after round as Zero jeers at the dragon from her side. It's almost heartwarming to see everyone work so diligently together to kill the beast.

"I think this one's almost down!" Elsword yells, his endless drive to fight slowly being dimmed by sheer exhaustion. "Let's give it our all, everyone!"

The rocky tower shakes as it lights up in horrid magenta again. Add dives out of the way, dragging Ain and Rena with him, and hits the ground as the three of them narrowly escape another magical meteor that cracks the stone of the tower with its impact. "I dunno about you, but we're kinda running low on fuel!" he yells, rising to his feet and summoning his dynamos to his side. They whirl through the air, crackling on the waves of demonic energy. "Can we even kill one?"

"Yes, we absolutely can," Chung says, loading another cannonball and taking aim. "Heads up!"

He fires.

The cannonball arcs through the air like a shooting star, crashing down on the dragon head in a massive blue wave. Chung and his Destroyer are propelled backwards with the shock of the recoil, practically sliding off the tower with the shockwave, but Raven and Ciel are able to catch him before he falls off.

Thankfully, the damage is done. Add heaves a sigh of relief as the gravity field of the blast washes over the dragon head, the beast roaring as it thrashes in pain. The massive head swings from side to side, digging up stone and brick alike as the horns plow through the surface of the tower. Add grits his teeth and jumps up high, letting his dynamos catch him in midair as he jumps over the dying dragon.

The head hits a nearby rocky spire with a thump, finally dead. Elesis hops down from the top of the spire, perching lightly on the fallen beast's horns. "Good riddance."

"That's one down," Aisha says, reaching for her pack at her side. "Let's try and patch up some of our injuries before we get to work on the other heads."

Rena grimaces as she rifles through the bandolier she's brought. "I don't know if I'll have enough for all of us. Ain, you'll have to help me out here with the healing, I think—"

Something changes in the air. The ground rumbles, and they all turn in horror to the source—the felled head of the dragon, _they one they supposedly managed to kill_. "It can't be," Lu says, desperation creeping into her voice. "It's a hydra."

The dragon head—with Elesis _still hanging onto its horns for dear life_—rises into the air, alive again, and _howls_ at them.

"ELSA!" As always, Elsword is the first to react, off like a rocket as he swings his sword. "HANG TIGHT, WE'LL GET YOU DOWN!"

Add isn't far behind, commanding blasts of energy to run through his limbs as he lands punch after punch on the thick hide. One blow sinks under a scale, into the softer hide and flesh underneath, and he's surprised to find his fist covered in flakes of dried blood when he retracts it.

What surprises him even more is the adrenaline rush that follows, the sheer joy that arises in the wake of his revelation. It's a thrill he hasn't felt in literal years, since his first journey through life with these people. _I hurt it_, it says. _I managed to land a hit on the beast. I could have killed it if I continued._

Then its tail sweeps his feet out from beneath him, and his back hits the stone painfully and immediately dispels all the feeling. Magenta flashes over him, and he only has a moment to realize he's going to die before his body is surrounded in purple and he's launched a million miles in a second. "Snap back into it," Aisha says, the glow fading from her staff in an instant before she turns back to the dragon with fire in her eyes. "Elesis, we're coming for you!"

The dragon bellows, and Add watches Elesis fall from its back in slow motion.

Not literally, of course. Time has yet to be his ally, and there's no way he can stop it enough to move across the rocky tower, to send his dynamos out. Every inch of him freezes, as Elsword's horrified scream pierces the air and Elesis disappears in a cloud of red blossoms into the void of the tower.

At the edge of the tower, Elsword and Aisha are kneeling at its edge, daring to dance near the dragon as Aisha searches for the fallen warrior with her magic. "Elsa, you can't be gone," Elsword says desperately, "_please_, you can't be gone."

The tower rumbles. One of the other dragon heads comes crashing in their direction, and it's only instinct that makes Add leap out of the way before it slams into the spire and brings it down entirely. The entire top of the tower lights up in magenta.

"We have to run," Raven says, as horrified realization washes over them all. "We have to run! GET GOING!"

Add looks up into the jaws of Death itself, and summons his dynamos to his side.

It's too late to think about Elesis now; they can only hope that she survived the fall down the central shaft. It takes both Ciel and Raven to haul Elsword away from the edge of the tower, so that they can survive their descent with all their remaining team members.

As it turns out, they don't. The trip up was made much easier with Aisha and Rena's magic—they don't have that now with exhaustion bogging down every limb. Ain lags behind more and more, and by the time they reach the base of the stairwell, he has to be physically supported down the last few steps.

"I'm okay," he gasps, although it's clear that he isn't. Angry red lightning flickers across his skin, a reminder that he is the most vulnerable of them all in this forsaken continent, _they shouldn't have brought him here,_ and now he's literally struggling to breathe. "I'll just end Intervention, I'll recover—"

His breathing gets shallow, and he has to stop speaking just to conserve his breath.

"Get your El, everyone," Elsword says, voice shaking. "All of it. Doesn't matter what kind, we need to get him near it!"

_Isn't that funny,_ Add thinks, as he digs through his pockets and comes up with a pendant he wore as a child and a few spare shards he's collected over the years. Elesis had been the chosen of the El Lady, after all. She was a beacon of strength just as her brother is. Now that she's gone, her light extinguished, it's only a matter time before Ain's flickers out as well.

They crowd around him at the base of the tower, pressing the meager few stones to his chest, but slowly but surely, he starts to fade. "Please," Elsword whispers, like a mantra, even though everyone knows it's too late, "please. _Please_."

The little alcove fills with blue light, and when Add dares to open his eyes again, there is no dying angel lying on the ground. Their collection of El clatters emptily to the ground under Elsword's hands.

As Elsword begins to weep, and _why wouldn't he_, the poor boy just lost both his beloved sister and spiritual mentor within a matter of minutes, Add looks to the stains of dried blood on his glove. The momentary thrill of the hunt, the kill, it all comes flooding back to him, and he craves it.

_I must have more_, it says, that beast inside him. _I want to taste blood again_.

* * *

It's hard to mourn when neither death leaves a body.

They return to the Tower of Grief after recovering a while, and although they search tirelessly for anything remaining of Elesis, all they're able to find is the mangled remains of her claymore. Nothing remains of Ain, not even a scrap of fabric.

The dark elves from the village seem to sense their young leader's grief, and allow them to bury the claymore quietly among themselves. For Ain, they choose a sparkling El shard from Elsword's own collection, placing it in a basket that Rena weaves diligently from bush grasses. They hold the joint funeral among themselves, and even Chloe has the dignity to join them, standing stoically at Elsword's side while he grieves.

The first signs that the deaths of Elia's herald and her agent are seriously affecting the others come from Rose. She goes very quiet after they return from the Tower of Grief the second time, and doesn't speak much until she coughs up blood at the dinner table. Elder Edith diagnoses her with a terminal lack of El, and she accepts it calmly and passes overnight. This time, the funeral is much worse now that there _is_ a body to bury.

It becomes apparent that they've been spoiled by the light of the El over the years, and from then on, breathing through each day becomes a bit harder. Elsword is a beacon of El on his own; Rena thrives in the light of her innate El; Raven and Eve have El built into their bodies that powers them and prevents them from suffocating; Lu and Ciel frankly couldn't care less; Eun's prowess over the moon El protects Ara; and of course, Add just cannot die.

The same does not apply to Aisha and Chung, though. Chung's childhood illness comes back to haunt him, and despite all of their attempts to save him, the tumour eats away at his heart and leaves him lifeless in the cold evening. Elsword works diligently at his side like an angel, fighting back tears until his best friend's cold hand goes limp, and in the end, he's the one who closes his eyes to lay him to rest.

Aisha holds on as best she can. They all pile all of their excess El on her, giving her a bubble of safety to stay in. It's not enough. She coughs herself to pieces as her past cuts open up again and start to weep crimson tears.

"I'm sorry," she laughs, even though blood bubbles at her lips with every painful word, "I thought I'd survive. Guess I'm weaker than I thought, after all."

"Aisha, you've always been stronger than me," Elsword says pleadingly, grasping onto her bandaged hands. "Don't say that now. You'll survive, okay? You're going to live, we've going to head home and you'll be okay."

"Yeah, we'll head home alright." Another cough, this time weaker. "Together." Her eyes focus somewhere else, a million miles away. "Together…"

To Elsword's credit, he does not break. First his sister, then his mentor, then his best friend, then his childhood love; it's honestly a surprise to Add that the younger boy does not break entirely. He carries his head high, steels himself to bury a loved one, one more time.

Add spends the time between burials fighting in the woods. Occasionally, he'll catch a demon here and there, an incubus flying overhead, a Waldo with a pack of glitters. He encounters new types of demons, and he assigns names to them—blue Seekers, serpentine Mirages, and massive hulking Rackets. He kills all of them, one at a time, either with his dynamos or his scimitar. It doesn't matter, in the end. As long as they bleed before him, he's satisfied.

The joy of the hunt does not escape him, but in a way, it's an addiction of its own. Unlike the years-long pain of weaning himself off the intoxication of the Elrian poppy, the adrenaline of the kill, the sheer _bloodlust_, is only momentary. There is no tolerance, only ever-growing pleasure from every kill he makes. As his friends lay dying indoors, he slashes through the hearts of a million demons and leaves every regret buried in their cold chests.

He buries the tip of his scimitar in the abdomen of a succubus, and twists. The demon's body lurches as the blade sinks in, gushing out in black blood with a delicious squelch. He grins. The succubus goes still.

Add licks his lips, and drinks in the satisfaction of the moment.

* * *

The war horn blows in the evening, bringing everyone to attention from their dinner.

A scout comes running in, and quickly transmits a message to Elder Edith, who immediately stands up, fire in her eyes. "The village is under attack," she translates. "The Crimson Flame has sent its wards after us." She swears in Elven under her breath. "Where is Chloe?"

Rena rushes to the door, Raven at her heels and already drawing his sword. Eve's drones fly in from opposite sides of the room, propelling her out within seconds. Ara has been partially transformed into Eun for her own protection for the past week; it only takes a heartbeat to complete the job and for her to dash out the door. Elsword stands solemnly at Edith's side for a moment more, lingering.

"We'll keep them at bay for as long as we can, Elder," he says, and there is steely resolve in his voice where there once was grief. "You should take as many as you can and escape."

"I cannot leave our home behind, young one," Edith says, shaking her head. "It is all we have left."

"But you can, and you have to," Elsword insists. "If this is the home you'll die to stay with, then what of the others? They deserve to have the chance to live, too! The village is nothing without its inhabitants."

Add doesn't stay to hear the rest of his plea. He summons his dynamos to his side, and steps into the chaos.

With all the clandestine fighting he's been doing lately, Add knows how to maneuver around the incoming demons, just where to plunge his dynamos so that the shock unhinges their jaws and leaves them paralyzed while he cuts them down. He sees from the corner of his peripheral vision the sparkling green arrows that belong to Rena, the bursts of blue that must be Eve, a burst of blue spirits from Lu and Ciel. Their lights only flicker for a moment before he leaves them behind.

He is the conqueror. He is the one who will survive. He will win this.

His dynamos whirl to life at his command, once again opening the portal to the void in the sky. As the gravitational spheres begin to drop down like hail on the incoming demons, Add starts to laugh.

"This is the best kind of feeling," Add says, _yells_, until his voice is hoarse and he can't feel his chest anymore. "This is the feeling of _triumph!_ Of _victory_ over _death!_ I—" He can't help but giggle. "I feel so _alive!_"

There is blood running down the side of his face, and it's so dark that he can't tell if it's his or not, but he turns to Ara with his white hair stained black and crimson and grins. "Pray tell me, Ara dear," he purrs, "since we're the last ones standing, are you not afraid? Does this _massacre_ not frighten you?"

Ara—brave, brave Ara, who has outshined them all just for this moment of clarity—for her part, she exhales and leans a bit more on her spear. "Add," she says, voice betraying her exhaustion, "sometimes, the world just takes _too much_ from a person, and all we can do is patch up the scars and move—"

She doesn't finish the sentence. Eun's influence drains from her spontaneously, and her hair is left as dark as the bloody iron blade that pierces through her chest. It's a very rapid change. The last light of golden hope fades from her eyes, and then she is just another broken body on the ground, forgotten in the heat of the battle.

And indeed, as Add looks around him, there is nothing but bodies and demons. There are scraps of fabric in some corner that might have once belonged to Elsword's outfit, a mangled scrap of steel from Raven's arm, a crushed claw from Lu's gauntlet. A trampled flower settles on the ground, stained with Edith's blood. At the end of the day, it's down to just him again, little, worthless Edward who just _can't fucking die._

He raises his hand over his head again, and the dynamos do the rest of the work for him.

What was it that Mother always said to him? _From stardust we came, and to stardust we'll go_. Cruel now the irony that his enemies die in a storm of stardust at his hands. He looks around at the carnage of the demons around him, satisfied with the open space he's gotten, and shifts his dynamos to _warp mode_.

Three months, all wasted. He scoffs at the scimitar in his hands, its intricate cold steel stained with blood, and tosses it aside. There'll be more futures with better weapons and better skills to pick up and better outcomes. He just has yet to find them.

Holding the dimensional door open, Add laughs and drops down through fate again.

* * *

**A/N: happy april fools day! it's time for a new fic**

**a few months ago, my dearest friend and i spent about 4 hours brainstorming together. what we ended up with was 4.5k words worth of plot that, after they left the idea in my hands, i synthesized into a single plan for a fic: _Genesis_. **

**unfortunately the working title for this fic was _real angst hours_, and i've made at least one person cry before posting this, so uh please be prepared. i think i said this when i posted _Jailbreak_ and again with _When the Winter Ends_, but the plans for this fic are probably some of the darkest things i will ever write, so please take care when you read.**

**in terms of actual update schedules, this won't be nearly as frequently updated as WtWE since a WtWE chapter is on average 1.6k words while this (probably one of the shorter chapters) is nearly 7.6k words. updates for _Genesis_ will always take place on the first of the month while WtWE will continue to update on mondays, and should an overlap occur like today, _Genesis_ will take priority.**

**finally, the first "chapter" of this fic serves as a table of contents of sorts. parts labelled with [REDACTED] are things that i haven't settled on names for just yet. those will be updated as the chapters come!**

**a few acknowledgements:**

**i'd like to thank my friends Tin (taee on ffn), Bread (post_mortem on ao3) and gremlin man feng for their beta reading! you guys caught a ton of mistakes that i made and smoothed over several stitches of words that were extremely bumpy, and i will be forever grateful.**

**the biggest thanks goes to morgan, who stayed up until 2 am with me and gave me creative control over an idea that was mostly theirs from the beginning. you're the real mvp!**

**i love you all, and i'll see you in a month!**

**~Marg**


	3. 2: Eight

Of course, the next timeline starts in the exact same way: Add falls through nothingness, because time is meaningless anyhow and he just keeps falling, falling, falling.

This time, though, there's something to hold onto. He catches in his hand a fleeting memory, a handhold that feels suspiciously like the leather-bound grip of the scimitar he left behind. His entire body practically snaps into place as his fall instantly slows to a stop, and he's left dangling over an abyss of nothingness, suspended in mid-void.

Carefully, he reaches out with one foot, feeling out the area for solid ground to stand on. Then again, it's unlike the timespace tapestry to offer him anything at all, much less the grip he's found. Thankfully, it's not really the damned scimitar, only the construct of a memory.

Add sets foot into the Weavers' Workshop, the ancestral home of all time travelers like himself seeking a place of their own in Fate. It is an empty expanse of space that offers nothing even remotely homelike, but Add thinks about his own childhood, and decides there isn't anything here that could be less welcoming than his upbringing.

For all that it sounds impressive in name, the Workshop is still hollow, and its hallowed halls offer no answer to any of the questions he has.

His deranged smile slowly dies off his face as he treads lightly across its lightless grounds. Each step echoes painfully, the sound fading out before it can fully take form. He searches out for the next step with his foot, finds none, and turns around. Someone walks out of the darkness like a silent angel.

"Still trying to play the cryptic mentor?" Add growls as Glaive comes to stand beside him. "News flash: it's not funny anymore."

Glaive hums in that annoying way of his, like he's contemplating something for the first time instead of having spent a millennium entertaining the thought. "So you've had your fun," he muses, looking over Add's bloodied clothes. "Don't you think it's about _time_ you started thinking about where you're going?"

Add bares his teeth at him. "I have," he snarls, "all the _time_ in the world."

And then he's falling, falling again. He's starting to get used to it.

* * *

The next timeline gives him a much nicer landing. He doesn't immediately crash to the ground and suffer the agony of all his bones trying to knit themselves back together. Instead, his dynamos catch him before he can hit the ground, or the demons that infest it.

Ah, yes, he'd forgotten how much he hates Lanox. It's hot, full of volcanic activity, and worse of all, there are mosquitoes _everywhere_. He _hates_ mosquitoes. He scowls and fries the nearest cloud in a bolt of electricity, hoping that none have infiltrated his personal space yet.

At the base of the volcano is the scene of an epic battle: the El Search Party in all their colourful glory, against what must be a whole legion of demons. Add laughs bitterly when he realizes that the flying ones haven't sensed his presence yet; all the better to launch a surprise maneuver on them. Someone detonates a fiery spell, creating an opening, and he swoops in to take the kill.

The first few blows are the most exhilarating—the adrenaline of the previous fight returns, the drive to fight and feel the blood rain down on his skin. He sinks a globe of shining plasma into a glitter's eye, watches as it jitters and smokes, and shoots an incubus out of the sky with a grin on his face.

Except the adrenaline doesn't build. He trips over a fallen glitter's spear, and suddenly all the joy of the battle drains away. He snarls and fights and _hunts_, but it doesn't come back. His bloodlust, it seems, has been cut short tragically by the lack of adrenaline that it should be giving him.

He blinks, and the battlefield falls away. The volcano looks like it's about to burst with his secrets. Around him, demons are retreating, and bodies sit in stagnant piles around the telltale purple burn marks of his plasma attacks. The occasional splashes of colour in the bleak landscape belong to the people who call themselves his friends.

"Dude, that was absolutely _amazing!_" Elsword crows, hoisting himself to his feet with his sword nearby. "How did you do that?"

Add snorts. "Magic, obviously," he says. When Elsword looks at him questioningly, he realizes that the boy actually took his word for it. "It's technology. Probably too hard for you to understand."

"Oh, that's cool." If Elsword was phased by his sardonic tone, he doesn't show it. "Say, what's your name? You look like a really, really powerful demon fighter! You could join us, we're looking for the source of them."

That's when Add remembers that there's a massive demon stronghold in Lanox, one that the others probably haven't uncovered yet, and who knows, he might just be able to sate his appetite in the chaos of the battle. Despite his best efforts, the adrenaline hasn't returned.

(He wants it. He _needs_ it.)

"Sure, why not," he says, and nearly laughs out loud when he sees the delighted spark in Elsword's eyes. The kid is really too enthusiastic about these things. "It's been a while since I've travelled with people."

"Great!" Elsword sticks a hand out. "My name's Elsword Sieghart. What's yours?"

Add closes his eyes, fails to hide a smirk, and shakes on it. "Add Kim, at your service."

* * *

Add remembers too many things sometimes, the worst of which regularly come back to haunt him. He supposes that having a photographic memory and being a time traveller has its downsides.

The worst memories are the lies. He's told too many lies lately. He counts the worst ones off his scarred, broken fingers:

1\. He told Rena in this timeline (and the last one) that all the El Search Party members died in his first timeline. That is a lie. He was bored, and a coward, and left before the fighting got "bad". If he had the technological skill to, he would return to that timeline to slaughter every demon standing in their way and secure them a flawless victory. Unfortunately, that remains beyond his abilities.

2\. He told the El Search Party in the last timeline that he came from a broken world ruled by militant Nasod. That is a lie. He had to make it up on the spot to explain why he was trying to strangle Eve when he landed in the last timeline. He has never been to a broken world ruled by militant Nasod, and doesn't intend to go looking for one anytime soon.

3 & 4. He told Elsword in this timeline that his name was Add Kim, and that he hadn't travelled with others for a long time. Those are both lies. His name is Edward Grenore, though he hasn't used it since _that_ timeline, since he looked himself in the eye and found a scared boy of five years old dying at his hands. He's not sure whether he deserves to use the Grenore name anymore, or if he even deserves to have friends.

5\. He told Ciel he wasn't hungry just now. That is a lie. He is practically _starving_ right now, having used his energy up during today's battles, but regret fills the stomach just as much as a warm meal. While the other El Search Party members eat around the fire, their wounds cleaned and wrapped up, Add sits by the riverside with a little pot of grassy ointment and a roll of bandages, and tries to patch up new wounds that run deeper than their physical constituents.

"You look lonely."

Add turns around in a flash, nearly dropping the length of bandage he's wielding directly into the river. Just behind him, Ara stands with a plate of leftovers from dinner—a sandwich with roast beef, and what looks like some of Ciel's cucumber pickles. "Can't you see I want to be alone?" he scowls. "Besides, I said I wasn't hungry."

His stomach growls helpfully.

Ara keeps her Mona Lisa smile, though. "I never said you were." She politely folds her knees under her at his side, sitting in her "proper" lady-way as she leaves the plate of food between them. "I only thought that you might need to keep your energy up, seeing as we'll be heading into the demon stronghold in a day's time."

Add stares at her. The shadows of the night dance across her skin, and between the moon above and the fire behind her, she looks eerily like some sort of deity incarnate. That said, she might as well be one. "Why do you care?" he asks bluntly. "Rena bothers to look after me because it's in her elven creed. Elsword asks after me because he's under some delusion of leadership. So what about you?"

"We follow Elsword because he _is_ a leader," Ara says. _God_, he wants to wipe that smile off her face. It's starting to get annoying, and a bit creepy. "Not because he has delusions or whatever. And the elven creed is only a guideline. We look after you—we _care_ because you're our friend. All of us."

Great. He lasted three months in the last timeline. He won't last _two weeks_ here. "I don't have friends," he says acidically. "Leave me alone, please."

Ara only dips her head politely (he wishes she would just stop, _stop_ doing the thing where she pretends to be so polite and well-educated, but then again, she was brought up like this, wasn't she?) and rocks back on her heels to stand up. "There's still more food if you want it," she says, and then she's gone.

Add looks down at the plate. The sandwich is falling apart, but it's clear it was made for him. There's a massive stack of meat between the two pieces of bread, and the entire sandwich is sliced in half diagonally, just the way he likes it. The pickles are even the good ones, not the soggy centres of the cucumbers that only masochists and Lu like to eat.

A little guiltily, he finishes wrapping his arm, picks up the sandwich and takes a bite.

* * *

"Well, I think we've reached the point of no return," Rena sighs, dropping her lamp. Add blinks away the dark spots in his vision. "Your iritis is spreading to your sclera, and none of my herbs will make a dent in it. Worse yet, I think it might even be spreading to your other eye. I'm sorry."

Add gave up on his eye a long time ago, after discovering that trying to solve the problem himself only made it worse. In fact, he's pretty sure the worst of the iritis is probably his own fault. "S'okay," he mutters, as Rena returns to mashing herbs with her mortar and pestle. "I'm used to it."

"Yeah, but you shouldn't be." Rena laughs a little to herself, a little cynically. "I'm sorry. That was the wrong thing for me to say. You shouldn't _have to_ be used to dealing with the worst case of iritis I've seen in all my years. And trust me, I've seen a lot of iritis in my lifetime. You wouldn't expect it, but elves get a lot more eye conditions than humans do."

"I'm not human," Add says under his breath, "not anymore."

Apparently, Rena hears it, because her ears perk up. "What do you mean, not—"

The camouflaged incubus drops out of the sky like a stone, and sinks its axe into her back like she's made of clay.

Add acts immediately, of course, a carnal scream erupting from his chest as he fries the incubus to nothing. _It's not safe, nothing is safe, they're all going to die here, starting with Rena._

Ain is the first to arrive, _thank Ishmael,_ he's the only other one with any sense of medical knowledge in their little team. "Deep breaths," he tells Rena, who has gone frighteningly still with the axe still buried blade-deep in her back. She seems to be whispering a prayer. "It will all be okay."

Raven kneels next to her and clasps her hand. "You'll be okay," he whispers, but it sounds more like he's reassuring himself than her. "You'll be okay, Rena."

Her eyes lock on Add. "_P-pel-umbar_," she gasps, "_cuita_."

And then her gaze goes glassy, and all they can do is watch as her blood stains the earth and her spirit falls through the sky.

* * *

Raven doesn't trust him, but he doesn't blame him, either.

A little sapling grows where they bury Rena. Add finds Raven there, watching it grow and sprinkling it with a bit of El-infused water as a ward against the nearby demonic influence.

"She said something to you before she… left," he says quietly. "What was it?"

Add stares blankly at the little Rena-sapling. "I don't know," he confesses. "I don't speak Elvish."

Raven doesn't even glance at him. "I guess we'll never know, then," he says.

(Add has heard his story enough times. It's rather tragic seeing him lose sight of the same face twice in one lifetime.)

* * *

The trek through the portal and into Elysion is a bit harder without Rena there to patch up their wounds, but the others take it relatively well. Aisha learns some minor healing spells, and the rest of them take to carrying supplies from Rena's old pouch of medicine. It's a little extra burden, but it's worth it when they come out of skirmishes with cuts and bruises up their limbs.

During their week resting in Elysion proper after ascending from Atlas Station, Add spends a lot of time exploring. The girls like to sing around the trees on either end of the city; he avoids those like the plague, especially when they sing hymns for Rena. Instead, he studies the mechanisms that hold the city together, and tries his hardest not to just escape into the wilderness to fight something.

He spends a good amount of time talking to Theodore and Durenda. Theodore, as he finds out, is a defective third-generation Nasod—his visual sensors are virtually useless, and the motors in his legs don't quite work right. When Add offers to fix them, Theodore just laughs. "I thank you for the offer, but I must decline. There is nothing you could do that I haven't already tried."

Durenda, on the other hand, is clearly displeased with his mere existence in her city. She has strong eyes and stronger legs and an even stronger sense of justice. She takes one look at Add, deems him "wimpy", and tells him he needs to eat more.

He's not sure which of them is better to talk to, because both are sardonic and done with life in very different ways. Theodore has accepted that he'll most likely never leave Elysion because of his mechanical issues, and Durenda has accepted that she'll most likely never leave Elysion because "this darn city needs protecting from the shitstorm out there, dammit." Somehow, it's comforting in the wake of Rena's death.

Thankfully, it's easy to keep up conversation with them both. Durenda discovers his found knack for curved blades one afternoon and draws him into a thoughtful discussion about mechanising traditional weaponry. She doesn't lower her prices, though, and only laughs when Add balks at the price tag on her wares. "Those ain't easy to make, pipsqueak. I'm just putting a proportionate price for my effort."

Theodore, on the other hand, is a bit more mysterious about his wares. He keeps a flock of mechanical doves that ferry his messages between himself and his friends, since he can't move around to talk to them himself. Sometimes, he types his messages into a little keyboard that he hooks up to a dove before releasing it into the sky. "What's that for?"

"Oh, that's for Hugo." Somehow, Theodore's Mona Lisa smile is just as infuriating as Ara's. "He's a bit damaged in some places—broke his auditory sensors, can you imagine?"

"I really can't," Add mutters.

"He has a hard time listening to auditorily recorded messages, so I send them to him in typed text instead." Theodore raises one spindly arm, allowing a returning dove to land. "Thank you, Karl. May I hear your message?"

The dove opens its beak obediently. It's a message from Durenda, who likes to shout them out as if Theodore's hearing is escaping him too. Add has heard her deliver her speeches enough times in person to know to step away from the bird before it starts squawking.

"_You'll catch your death of cold out there, Butterfingers! Let the rest of us handle things outside of the city. Besides, the little Queen and her human kids are plenty capable, even if they're dumb fucks more often than not."_

The dove closes its beak, its message delivered. Theodore pats it affectionately on the head and allows it to hop off onto the nearby stand.

"Butterfingers?" Add asks with amusement.

"Just a nickname she has for me." Theodore throws his braid over his shoulder as he reaches into the birdcage and extracts a defiantly-flapping dove. "Saw me drop an El stone once, eons ago. She'll never let me live it down."

He presses a button on the bird's back. "Thank you for the concern, Durenda," he dictates, "but I assure you, I believe I am the only one with an eye that can discern the materials that I need from outside the city. One of these days, I shall go out there, and there will be nothing you can do to stop me." He lets go of the button, and the dove chirps. "Please bring the message to Durenda. Thank you, Andy."

Andy makes a churring sound, like it's mildly displeased, and then flutters off, taking advantage of the natural breeze of Elysion's eternal spring.

"You're a weird bunch," Add comments, and Theodore turns to face him. "How long have you Nasods been in Elysion? A thousand years? Two thousand?"

"A thousand, three hundred and sixty-five," Theodore says airily. "Durenda's been around for a bit longer. I think Hugo's coming up on two thousand."

"And yet you're all still such close friends." Add flicks a petal off the counter; it spirals gracefully through the air to settle on Theodore's outstretched foot. "How do you do it?"

Theodore smiles again, and Add has to immediately fight the urge to punch him in the face. "Oh, we have our spats," he says, "but time has only brought us closer. It is easy to learn everything there is to know about someone over a long time, after all."

He fixes Add with a gaze, mechanical golden eyes piercing far deeper than they should. "And at the end of the day, isn't time the thing you have the least of?"

Add excuses himself and leaves quickly.

* * *

"Hang tight!" Elsword screams over the un-silence. His voice echoes hollowly and fades much too quickly, but nobody expects sound to carry well in the gaps between dimensions. "We just need to find the corresponding portal out!"

"There's nothing but the void!" Aisha snaps. "How do you expect us to find an entire portal in this darkness?"

Elesis shudders. "This isn't darkness," she says, "this is _un-light_."

And really, Add can't argue with her. He's been in the Workshop, the space outside time, and it practically feels like a home to him. Now that he's wandering in the time outside space, the unholy grounds of the dark god Henir, he feels a chill down his spine. Maybe all the thinly veiled warnings that Denif (and Glaive) gave about Seven Tower were right. This doesn't feel right.

"To the right!" Raven yells, swinging his sword in a wide arc as one of the void beasts slithers past him. "Single file, we can't afford to lose balance here!"

They shuffle again across the strange obsidian blocks that float through nothingness and slowly ferry them towards… what? The portal? Varnimyr? Certain doom? Add knows they'll find the portal eventually, they always do, but it's significantly more difficult without Rena around to calm them down and keep their heads steady.

"Uh, there's something big around here," Chung calls, a quake in his voice. "And it doesn't look friendly."

Add is about to ask what _big_ entails when a beast he can only call the Leviathan rises above them all and casts its un-shadow over them.

"Oh," he manages. "That's a first."

"RUN," Elesis shrieks, and in the time it takes for the Leviathan to raise its tail and smash it down, they've cleared the way, hopping from one block to another with no consideration for the gravity. Thankfully, the sheer size of the thing slows it down, but it swims through the un-space like some majestic, lethal fish that's ready to swallow them whole.

"It will catch up in mere seconds," Eve shouts, zipping on her boosters and dragging Chung along with her. "We will need to take a stand!"

"Fuck that," Add growls, and summons his dynamos.

They surround the Leviathan, whirling in progressively smaller and smaller circles as they start to generate energy to trap it in an energy field. "It won't hold," he yells, "keep running!"

He activates one backup dynamo in the time it takes for the Leviathan's tail to slip out of the field and trip Ciel over the edge.

For a terrifying moment, gravity doesn't take hold. Ciel simply floats, but no one has the strength to reach out to him, to catch him before he falls through dimensions and is lost to them forever. Then there's a flash of blinding blue light in the shape of a four-pointed star, and Lu is ejected from the void and directly into Chung and Raven's waiting arms as Ciel succumbs to the pull of gravity and falls.

Lu screams herself hoarse in an instant, but it's no good, he's _gone_ and they need to keep moving before the Leviathan gets the rest of them too. Eve shoots a taser-like bullet from a single outstretched finger, and it buys them a few more seconds to get over a hurdle of stones in the way, into the portal that stands before them like a god-given grace.

For once, Add is relieved to be back in the unwelcoming land of Varnimyr.

Then he looks over at Lu, and the way she ages an eternity in an instant, and the spell breaks. Her childish face is instantly marred with wrinkles of a much older demon as she laughs between the tears. "Stupid human butler," she manages, "you can't force a contract like that. You've broken the terms."

The rest of her melts to water, and even that evaporates quickly in the blistering heat of Varnimyr's wastelands.

As the remnant of the El Search Party settle into silent, shocked grief, Add can't help but remember that this is far from the first funeral without a body that he's attended, and he can't help but note that this is far from the last.

* * *

Like they did for Elesis and Ain in a different timeline, a different life, they find trinkets to bury instead of bodies. For Lu, it's a teacup and saucer that she gave Eve in an act of solidarity between two queens. For Ciel, it's a bottle of his favourite blade polish that somehow ended up in Raven's pack. They say their prayers, even Ain, and then they're on their way again.

(Because death of their friends is not even remotely the worst thing that's happened to them thus far, because none of them have seen the living purgatory that Add forces himself through on the daily—)

"This jungle is just ridiculous," Elesis mutters, pushing aside a segment of the undergrowth to allow Rose and Eve to pass. "How do things grow so well around these parts? Isn't Varnimyr supposed to be a lifeless, godless wasteland?"

"Yeah, but demons have to come from somewhere, right?" Elsword winces. "... I'm sorry. That was insensitive of me to say so soon after we lost two of our friends."

Add grits his teeth and wishes he still had his scimitar. A sharp blade of cold steel would do _wonders_ in this foliage. Instead, he rips a fern out of the way and hopes it doesn't bat someone in the face as it springs back. It hits Chung in the face anyways.

"Everyone, look." Ara points ahead in their path; even with the flora in the way, Add can narrowly spot a little clearing cleansed by light. "Do you think that's a safe place to stay?"

Aisha shakes her head. "It probably belongs to the dark elves that inhabit this part of the continent," she says. "Lu… Lu was explaining them to me before we came here. She said they have a lot of sacred ceremonies in little clearings in the jungles. It's part of their religion."

Ain makes a face. "Their religion? Didn't Miss Knight Captain say that Varnimyr was, ah, _a lifeless, godless wasteland_?"

Several things happen at that moment, the first of which being that a mounted dark elf warrior tears through the brush and jabs the tip of her spear directly into Aisha's stomach.

Blood immediately gushes from her wound, and Add doesn't have to stop and get his head knocked off to know that it's probably fatal. Another warrior with a veil over their face emerges from the clearing, shouting something in Elvish, and brandishes a wicked crossbow to sink three arrows in Ain's chest.

Add doesn't even think. He grabs the closest arms, because _two is better than nothing, right?_ and activates his teleportation command.

Except it's not two, it's just one as Chung's sleek armor slips from his grasp, and Ara's arm is the only one he manages to hold onto before the bubble pops and they're transported deep into the forest at an instant. "Holy shit," he breathes, "the others—"

Ara rises to her feet, leaning on her spear, and bares her teeth at the unforgiving jungle environment. "They're going to be captured," she says with fire in her voice. "We can't do anything about them now."

"They'll die," Add says.

"I know." Ara whirls around to face him, her face entirely unreadable. "Why didn't you save the others? Why me?"

Add can't find an answer for her.

Something roars in the distance, and there are more voices of angry elves. Add doesn't needs to speak their language to know that they've realized that there were two more, that two have escaped into their holy forest, that there are two that need to be captured. "We can't stay here," he says, extending a hand out to Ara, "they'll find us soon enough. We're sitting ducks if we stay."

"How else are we going to save our friends?" Ara demands. "We can't just leave them!"

"Oh, for the love of—" Add grabs her by the shoulders. "We can't help them if we're all dead!"

An elven warrior on the back of a demonic jaguar leaps into clearing, and they're out of time. Add activates the teleportation command again, and holds on as tightly to Ara's shoulders as he dares.

When he opens his eyes again, they're back at the abandoned campsite where they buried their memories of Lu and Ciel—nearly a week's trek away from the dark elf village. His dynamos are overheating. They won't be able to teleport back for some time. There's virtually no way they'll save the others now.

Add stares into the oblivion of Varnimyr as Ara puts her head in her hands and weeps.

* * *

For all that it's highly guarded, Add finds it tragic that the dark elves don't find them when they sneak back into the village.

"Where is that yelling coming from?" he mutters, furiously typing a new string of commands into his portable keyboard. They've only got a small window of opportunity to save their friends, and for all he knows, they could already be too late. It's only fate that's kept them from dying at the hands of the dark elves themselves.

Ara blanches. "That's Elesis," she whispers. "They're being brought to the gallows." The dark elves don't use gallows, but their execution platform gives off a similar aura. "We need to go, now—"

Someone yells, and there's a sickening crunch somewhere. Add winces. "Alright, alright."

He activates the command he was creating, grabs Ara's arm, and runs.

They duck behind a building, just hidden out of view but in the perfect line of sight to see their friends being pushed and prodded on their way up to the execution platform. "We're innocent!" Elesis yells, and gets another slap across her already-bloody face for it. "We've done nothing wrong! _Why won't you fucking believe us?_"

"Silence." A dark elf draped in a black cloak steps onto the platform, and Add has to force down a shiver when he realizes that Chloe's cape is literally made of _demon skin_. "You have trespassed on our holy grounds and defiled our sacred groves. You should be _grateful_ that we haven't sent a battalion to eradicate your kind in your dimension."

"We haven't trespassed anything," Elesis argues, but Add can tell she's running out of things to buy time with. "We didn't enter any sacred groves. You're just killing us because you can!"

The town elder slams her staff to the ground, and a wave of dark energy thunders out, silencing everyone instantly. She says something gravely, and Chloe nods and gestures to the nearby attendants, who have just finished binding the El Search Party to the stakes they're due to be executed on. The attendants each reach into their packs, bringing out a single seed, which they lay at the the feet of the damned.

"It has to work now, right?" Ara asks urgently. "Your distraction has to work now."

Add glances at his control panel, and hisses angrily. "It's behind schedule," he whispers. "Why isn't it working? It has to work—"

The elder barks out an order, and raises her staff. The seeds sprout and grow uncontrollably like indigo serpents, engulfing each of the El Search Party members and wrapping them entirely from head to toe. Elesis manages a strangled squawk before the vines close over her face, and then she's gone.

There is no miracle. Add's command does not activate miraculously at the last second. None of their allies reveals a hidden knife they'd been hiding in their sleeves to aid their escape. The executioner vines grow thicker and coil tighter. Add feels the pressure build up painfully in his chest as Ara nearly cries out beside him, but they can't afford to be heard now, not when everyone else is being killed and _they're the only ones left_—

The vines fall away, and there is nothing left of their friends.

Chloe announces something in Elvish. Ara is quietly sobbing beside him, clutching her spear like it'll actually do something now that everyone they know in this god-forsaken land is gone, _dead_. The crowd disperses like flies, threatening their hiding space.

Add only hears the ticking of the accidental bomb he'd placed in his ears as its pressure builds up towards the doom of the village. He grabs Ara, spear and all, and teleports just out of range at the last minute.

Somewhere, close to the heart of the village, something detonates after all its engines give out all at once.

The last thing Add sees of the elven village before its complete destruction is Chloe staring directly into the violent violet mushroom cloud.

* * *

Ara doesn't talk to him for nearly two days.

She assures him she's not angry with him, just with the world and all its cruelties, and Add is only left slightly pacified when she leaves the mountain cave for a bit only to return with a few edible berries.

They're running out of supplies. They chose this particular cave for its proximity to running potable water, but even that seems to trickling to a slow stop. Add looks through what's left, realizes it's mostly herbs, and decides not to tempt fate by eating them.

What's most horrifying is that the adrenaline drive has returned. A glitter climbs up to their hideout one morning (or at least Add thinks it's morning) and he slaughters it without a second thought, ripping its own blade from its hands and tearing its heart out. He keeps the blade for self defense, or at least that's what he tells himself.

(He doesn't miss the look of horror that Ara fixates on him, and chooses to ignore it in favour of cutting down another demon.)

He punishes the few dark elves that are left for _daring_ to kill his friends. It doesn't matter that they call him Death, or that they plead for mercy when he raises his weapon and carves their hearts out. It barely even matters that he isn't bringing any edible food back to their meager shelter. He's found his spark again.

Theodore was right in some ways. A timeline can only be so long with him in it, after all, and he really does not have a lot of time left in this one. So he slaughters and he harvests the joy that accompanies it, because time is the one thing he has the least of despite being immortal until the time sickness gets to him. He looks at the bloody irony and laughs at it.

He _should_ leave this timeline. His dynamos are all online, and it would only take him a fraction of a moment to leave this timeline. But something tells him he should milk every last drop of satisfaction out of it, kill everything he can before he leaves instead of leaving Ara to take his happiness from him. The next timeline would just be the same thing, over and over, right? He might as well stay.

It goes something like this: existence got boring after the first few timelines that Add fucked up. He laughs and laughs as the blood rains down around him and he thanks the El Search Party for this license to kill. After all this time moping and not doing anything, the earnest struggle of survival is fulfilling; the senseless violence of a mortal being's existence is immensely addictive and entertaining. He doesn't care that he's practically starving, that he hasn't seen proper food in a day and hasn't had water since their stream ran dry this morning.

He's happy to simply feel _alive_ again.

* * *

"We should go check what's left of the village," Ara suggests on the third morning where they've run out of food. Thankfully, the stream still trickles on occasion; Ara has been scooping all of it up in her flogged canteen. "Maybe there'll be some supplies remaining. Maybe some of our friends survived."

Add looks down the side of the mountain, looks into the movement that still marks the ruins of the village, and grins. "Of course. Do you want to take the scenic route or the express route?"

Ara doesn't respond, just tips her canteen up for one last meager mouthful and wipes her lips on the back of her hand.

As it turns out, they do take the scenic route. Add hacks and slashes his way through the jungle, slicing through vines that mar their way. Occasionally they come across stray demons. He dispatches them quickly, either with his new demon weapon or with his dynamos.

There is nothing left to the village. His glorious explosion _levelled_ it, leaving no survivors and no hint of their existence behind. He surveys it from his perch in the town fire pit, which is covered in a fine layer of lavender dust and leafy debris blown in from the jungle. Privately, he considers it to be his greatest achievement: the eradication of a whole village in a single command, with a single machine.

(Would that be genocide? Are there more dark elves in Varnimyr? Has he killed them all? He shudders to know the answers.)

"Well, there really is nothing," Ara reports, her spear trailing in her dust behind her. "Are we going to leave, or should we search for underground cellars?"

_Thoom._

Add only feels a little guilty when he looks towards the source of the sound with delight. _Something new to kill?_ "I fear we may have some company," he says, laughs, _giggles_, as one of the massive demons—he'd called them Rackets, a whole timeline ago—emerges from the woods. "Are you ready to fight?"

The only response Ara gives him is a huff and a flash of light as she surrenders herself to Eun's blessing.

And once again, they're fighting for their lives as demons stream in from all sides. There are demons with flame and demons with ice, and demons that fight with neither but something all the more terrifying. Add drinks up every moment of it, bathes in the adrenaline of the kill, _seeks it out_. He swings his blade in one hand and his dynamos in the other, like the conductor of a bloody orchestra.

Ara, on the other hand, flies across the battlefield like one of Theodore's doves. It seems like a whole timeline ago that Add saw the mechanical birds take to flight for the first time, but really, it hasn't been all that long, and he's just fooling himself. Her white hair and whiter tails are a cold silver against the fiery tones of the Varnimyr sky, one that Add can't help but laugh at.

Every time. Every single time, it ends like this, a fight to the end as he seeks out that one thing that keeps him going. He hasn't died yet in any of these timelines, and he's too much of a coward to taste death for himself before the time sickness forces it down his gullet itself. He envisions another final stand in another timeline, another lifetime, on a flaming plain decorated with the blood of his friends and his enemies.

But in this timeline, in this lifetime, it's not a plain they're fighting on. It's the ruins of a village, ruins that he made. Add stands in what must be the remains of the town fire pit, clearing out demons in wide circles around himself, laughing as his dynamos leave the taste of bitter ozone in their wakes.

"Isn't this glorious, Ara?" he asks her, throwing his hands out. The dynamos go flying. Empires fall. "This beautiful midnight abattoir? Isn't the adrenaline just wonderful?"

Ara might have responded, but all that comes from her is a grunt as she swings her spear and dispatches another demon.

"You must think me a monster for enjoying this," he continues, "so pardon me. I quite like the atmosphere, oh, the _blood_. Aren't you enjoying this, Ara? Are you disturbed?"

In that moment, as Ara yanks her spear from the decaying body of yet another demon and whirls around, Add sees anger in her eyes. Not anger for him, but for the world around her. Yes, Ara is beautiful, and young, and powerful and radiant and perfect in every way, but she is also just a girl who was forced into war to protect herself. Ara, who _he_ broke.

In that moment, as she responds with a single fiery "no", Add _flickers_.

He knows he flickers, because Ara's eyes go wide when she sees the child he really is, and that's exactly the moment when the incubus riding the nephilim bounds forwards and shatters her like glass.

Add snarls in the moment and drives his dynamos forwards, each plunging into the incubus and its mount like electric bullets at the speed of sound. Unfortunately, that's what opens him up to an attack, and as the demon slams its massive fists where he'd been standing a moment earlier, the wood beneath his feet cracks.

Some part of him laughs at the cruel irony when the well cover cracks. It wasn't the fire pit, after all; it was just the well cover, unscathed from his explosion. It breaks, and he leaves this timeline the way he enters it, falling through the darkness with no sense of direction or destination.

The blade pings as it ricochets through the well around him. He hears none of it. The well seems to drag out for an eternity. Add whips out his console with lightning speed, _how long do I have left until impact_, _**master override, damn it**_, and desperately hits the time warp button—

* * *

**A/N: at 4:27 in the afternoon, i realized i only had about 1000 words of this chapter and then proceeded to write the hell out of it despite stopping for dinner as well as a haircut**

**i do like this chapter a lot, though, beyond the painful deaths of the characters. writing the whole execution scene was probably my favourite part. i think that was about when i started to break this Ara, to turn her into the furious young woman you see at the end of the chapter.**

**some notes:**

**\- yes, Add does flicker into his child!Mad Paradox form. it won't be the last time you'll see that side of him, trust me.**

**\- i think i forgot to mention this in the first chapter, but all the Elvish words that Rena is using are Quenya. i have spent many long hours poring over Tolkien Elvish dictionaries to find those words, and i'm not entirely sure they're right. the words she says to Add before her death mean "fate-walker, live". does Add know that? probably not**

**\- updated notes from the morning afterwards: i realized a little belatedly that both Aisha and Ain would have been able to escape capture (Aisha by teleporting, Ain by ending Intervention) so i sunk some arrows in Ain to make up for it**

**on june first (that's exactly a month from now) i will be schmoozing in Japan so i mostly likely will not be around to upload unless i can figure things out with my ipad. i might ask a friend to upload for me if it doesn't work. i'll leave my notes in advance if that's the case!**

**~Marg**


	4. 3: With the Samanas

Time sickness is a cruel disease. It eats away at the heart and soul like a hidden malicious bug, a parasite unlike any other. It is ravenously hungry and takes only what it wishes from its unfortunate victims, who really have walked into this themselves. Like anthrax-grub and bee-larva, Add is powerless and can't do anything but stay put as his heart beats weaker and weaker and the time sickness eats away at his very life force. It leaves no open wounds on him from which to drink his will to live, and really, it doesn't need one—you don't need a straw to drink from a river, after all.

Glaive, being the awful mentor that he likes to be, has given no explanation to how the illness works aside from the fact that it will eat at him until he is useless to eat, either because he is dead or because he is no longer appetizing to it. Add isn't sure what he means by "no longer appetizing", but he's certain it has to be one of those deep philosophical concepts of lasting joy and happiness. Not that he understands that bullshit.

There really is only one simple cure for time sickness, and it is death. As Glaive so _helpfully_ pointed out, if the time sickness doesn't kill him, then Seven Tower will. He's been quite fortunate to not have crossed paths with the shadowy organization yet, but to be honest, he hopes he will. At least it'll spook him into trying to stay alive again, unlike this half-living purgatory he tries to drag himself through every day. A little excitement to keep him on his toes.

(Because if he has nothing to live for, Add thinks he might just try to stop living by his own means, and he isn't quite brave enough to take his own life yet.)

As he falls, again and again and again, Add can't help but think that time sickness is a little beautiful, too. He's seen empires fall and nations burn and hearts break, all in the span of a little more than a lifetime. Even though he's only really lived a little shy of nineteen years across all his broken timelines, it only serves to remind him that he's a little less than human, a little less than mortal.

Still, he falls. Somehow, he doesn't think he wants to land.

* * *

_Nine_

There is an underground demon base near their camp that Add likes to visit.

The others don't know about it, save for maybe Lu, and Eve if she were here. Some discreet questioning revealed months ago that the Nasod queen never joined their ranks in the El Search Party, but let them leave while she sits up in her winter halls in Altera. The others speak of her fondly, like they have some sort of running inside joke that Add will never understand.

He walks alone through the abandoned demon base sometimes when he can't sleep. The demons are long dead; he slaughtered them himself, set fire to the base with a spark from his dynamos against some paper cabinet in some manager's office. Despite the fact that they come from Varnimyr and have taken up camp in Lanox, Add finds it massively ironic that they're so susceptible to fire, or at least the chaos that stems from it. While he walked out of the base calmly and entirely unscathed, every demon in there burned to a crisp.

He walks in there now, grinding ashes to nothing underfoot. It's a lonely place to be, but he doesn't mind the feeling. He stumbles, he walks, he falls. He half expects to land back in the workshop. He picks himself back up when he doesn't.

There's footsteps behind him, and he turns around warily. Aisha's heels clatter against the ground; she turns her nose up at the smell of burnt bodies. "You've done a pretty bang-up job of burning this place down," she says, swinging her staff nonchalantly, "but really, you should leave some for the rest of us too."

Add scowls, stuffing his hands in his pockets. "It was an accident."

"Accidents don't burn down entire bases," Aisha says. "Besides, you'd know better than to set a cabinet on fire with a spark, wouldn't you?"

He goes tense in every muscle, and she grins with all her teeth. "Don't think I don't see you," she says in a low voice, "sneaking out at night. You're not the only one who can teleport. I've been watching you since you came into this insufferable timeline, and I'll be the one to remove you from it myself."

"Who the fuck are you, and what have you done with Aisha Landar?"

That's when it hits him. Aisha _Landar_. The Landar family, founder of the organization that would later become Seven Tower. Something must have happened in this timeline, something akin to a miracle, that prevented the Landars from splitting from the organization that ended up taking the most antagonistic side of the time-space tapestry.

And now, she has him cornered in an abandoned demon base, a place that none of their companions know about, a place where _they won't find his body_—

"You've been running for a long time," Aisha purrs, shaking her staff once with startling velocity. A ring of blades protrudes from the head of the staff, shimmering pale like holy mithril in the dim light. "Kinda common for time travellers, to be honest. I might as well put you out of your misery, huh?"

"You can't kill me," Add chokes. "The time sickness won't let me die. Not now, not here."

Her grin is practically feral. "Yeah, but I can't exactly let you stay here in _my_ timeline, can I?"

The emphasis shakes him for a moment, and Add realizes why. "You're scared of me," he laughs, causing Aisha to recoil. "You're trying to kill me, but that's just because you can't do it when I'm out of this timeline. You can't jump timelines—you can teleport, but your magic can't take you across time!"

She recovers quickly, with double the vigor and double the ferocity. "All the better for me to end you, here and now. The time sickness might repair your wounds, but I'm pretty sure you'll bleed out before it can reattach your head to your body."

The staff lashes out, and Add yelps as it grazes past his arm when he shies away. "You think you're so smart, evading Seven Tower with your little games of destruction," she says mockingly, spinning the staff menacingly in her grip. "How many times have I tried to reach out myself in another timeline, only to discover that _you've_ already killed _her_? Killed _me_? You need to be stopped before you burn down the entire continuum with your destruction."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Add says, and screams in pain as the blades sink into his chest. Blood starts to gush from the wounds, even as they struggle to knit themselves back together. "What do you mean, I've been evading Seven Tower? I've never even met anyone from Seven Tower!"

Aisha tilts her head curiously, and then something akin to a sadistic smile blooms on her face. "Well, you have now."

The staff comes down, and Add closes his eyes before it can cleave his head in half.

* * *

_Ten_

Add learns two things that day:

One, that death cannot save him from his illness. It seems that the time sickness behaves in a way that transports him to a new timeline when he dies a mortal death, because when he wakes up again, sporting a new rift-like scar down his scalp and nursing the worst migraine of his life, he's definitely not bleeding out in the demon base anymore.

And two, that people are cruel in that they try so hard to help. He's picked up by a lone traveller at the side of the road, and when he comes to after the worst of the migraine subsides, he's got bandages wrapped around his head, no eyepatch over his infected eye, and worst of all, only one functioning dynamo by his side, still weakly trying to catch the signal of the others left behind.

He repairs it while the Chung of this timeline glares him down on the other side of the fire. "You wandering alone, too?" Add asks, and Chung snorts.

The stories come out after that: stories of abandonment, and of abandoning, and of desertion and what can only be described as grief. A ruined empire; a broken body. A father he was unable to save, and (in the bitter subtext that only Add can hear) a group of friends that he was never able to make.

This Chung is different from most of the others he's met. Older, more jaded. More understanding of the weight on his shoulders. Less willing to put up with the evils of the world. He shoots before he asks questions, because it's what keeps him alive. Add admires this part of him for reasons he can't quite put his finger on.

"I never wanted this," this Chung says, with his scarf wrapped up to his nose and his voice muffled in the fabric. "I failed so many people that to be honest, I kind of deserve it. Better me than them, I suppose, now that they're all up in heaven or down in hell watching this shitshow play out. Might as well finish what they started before I kick the bucket, too."

"You're doing better than me," Add tells him. "You're stuck here for one miserable mortal life. I'm on my tenth timeline, and it honestly hasn't gotten better."

"Of course. More lives to live, more people to let down." Chung reaches for a nearby branch, scratches a design into the dirt at his feet. "Y'know, I lied earlier. I did meet the people you were talking about, the El Search Party. I just couldn't stay."

"Why not?"

"They all thought things would get better. And they were wrong." Chung holds his gaze in ice. Despite his youth, he has the haunted stare of a much older man. "There was a girl named Ara, I remember. Black hair, gold eyes. Thought she could change the world by fighting the demons. Wanna know what happened to her?"

"No," Add says weakly.

Chung goes on anyways. "Some demon caught a handful of her hair before we escaped the stronghold in Lanox. Dragged her in. I can still hear her screams."

"I think I'm going to be sick," Add says.

"Go ahead." Chung goes back to drawing his patterns in the dirt; Add recognizes them vaguely as protective runes. "You wouldn't be the first person to tell me that, and you're definitely not going to be the last."

(As it turns out, he _is_ the last, as Chung loads his Silver Shooters and glares down the growing dent in the cast-iron door and roars out a single "RUN". The door bursts open with demons, and Add is too busy remembering how to be a coward to look back and let himself watch the other boy be torn apart from limb to limb.)

* * *

_Eleven_

It's just as Chung said: it doesn't get better. Add drops into a world ridden by war (for what feels like the umpteenth time) and marches directly into battle. It's not much different from what he already knows: days of trekking through forests, across battlefields, down lonely valleys and into active volcanoes.

It's made slightly easier this time by the fact that there are others with him this time. It's not a complete El Search Party, but after what he's seen, Add's willing to take what he can get his hands on. This time, Elesis is off being a general in the Velder army, and Rena apparently never joined them, and Chung is busy rebuilding a nation that wasn't his to begin with.

That's all fine by him. Add has gotten by on much less. He remembers a timeline when he walked alone through a dust storm in Sander for six days straight. A living hell on earth, but nothing compared to this.

Not many regions in Elrios get snow, even in the midst of Yule. Somehow, the El Search Party's travels have brought them to the far north, deep into the mountains of Svalnoreldjergensen. Add deeply regrets not bringing another jacket.

"Check the thermometer," Add says, reaching for one of the shards of fire El he brought along. _Clearly, this wasn't nearly enough._ "If it's below negative thirty, we should be heading back."

Ara reaches into her pocket and brings out their one meager thermometer. "It's… Broken," she says, exhaustion seeping into her voice. "The fluid is leaking out."

"Trash it." The fire El starts to heat up; Add sighs in relief as some semblance of feeling returns to his fingertips. "The fluid's toxic, you'll die of mercury poisoning."

Disgusted, Ara tosses the remains of the thermometer out—and then recoils and brings her arm back under into her jacket. "This is too cold! We need to head back before it kills us!"

"No, we need to head back before it kills _you_," Add snaps, shielding his eyes. God, the light hurts. "You have a smaller body mass. You'll freeze before I do. We need to get out of here before you freeze to death."

Something roars in the distance. It sounds like the ice golems they were contracted to kill. "We need to go, now," Add shouts, as the mountainside rumbles. "If they get here now while we're still separated from the others and freezing—"

Naturally, this is when the ice golem erupts from the ground just in front of them, sending streams of snow flying into the air. Add winces as the creature lets out a guttural roar in front of him and Ara. "Okay, new plan," he says, "running will probably kill us. We need to hide."

Ara slams her spear into the ground, activating Eun's powers and dyeing her hair to the colour of snow. She shucks off her dark jacket, and instantly she's camouflaged into the snow, any semblance of orange in her outfit buried under the snow. Add shoulders his hoodie a bit more and shivers.

Ice golems are mostly blind, and operate through a combination of sound and smell. Snow dampens the senses, leaves one blinded and deafened. Add doesn't hear the ice golem scream until it's too late, and the cascading avalanche throws him over the edge of oblivion and into the depths of the snow below.

Shards of ice dig into his back, like piercing lithe needles of frost that tear the skin open into shreds. Add screams as he lands, and ice crackles against his clothes and tears him to pieces. "Elia save us," he groans, feeling his skin beginning to repair itself before he realizes, moments too late— "Oh no. Ara."

Ara doesn't have the luxury of time sickness's restorative properties. She's not in a jacket. Add digs through the snow, scraping armfuls away as he screams for her, hoping, _praying_ she's still alive.

Something shifts nearby. He leans in and grabs a hold of nine rapidly-fading tails, and eventually holds onto something that might be an arm. With a mighty heave, he pulls Ara out of the snow, and pulls her towards the nearest cave that he can see.

"Breathe," he tells her, as she coughs and hacks up ice. "It'll get better once you get it out of your lungs."

Ara inhales raggedly and spits out more ice. "Hurts," she gasps. Her breath comes in short little bursts. She's freezing to the touch. "Everything hurts."

"I know, I know." He shucks off his jacket and drapes it around her shoulders. "Look, we need to get you warm, okay? And I can't have you falling asleep on me here. What's something you can recite by heart?"

"Lullaby," Ara murmurs, clutching weakly at the edges of the jacket. "Mama taught me."

"Alright, then sing it," Add urges her. He's used up all but three of his fire El shards, which he now rubs to activate. They don't heat up nearly as fast as he needs them to. "C'mon, don't be shy."

"M-moonlight," she whispers, _why aren't the El stones working_, "stars shine, let your glow go… On…"

Her voice trickles to a stop.

Add stares at her helplessly until the wall caves in and three ice golems crash their mighty fists down and bash his head in.

* * *

_Twelve_

Add wakes up with a killer migraine and absolutely no will to live, but hey, that's just another day on the job. He peels himself off the ground and surveys his surroundings.

A beach, by the looks of it. Rocky, with a shallow tide pool not far away. The wash of the tide laps at his feet and stings the cuts on his ankles. So the ice pierced through his clothes. He's going to have to figure out how to patch those up.

On the other hand, the constant pain from exposure to the water tells him it's salted. He's landed by the ocean, with no sense of direction and no idea where he is, and no one shows up to greet him when he stumbles into the little community (it's much too small to be called a town) at the docks' edge.

He walks through a broken street, scuffling away abandoned tin cans and shattered glass bottles beneath his feet. Salt crusts up against the wood of the decaying homes. There's a fishing rod propped up against the side of a fence, a sign that says _Grilled Fish_ in faded letters. A sunlit sky, a quiet village.

Too quiet.

Add peers inside the nearest shop's window, finds nothing but dust, and when he can't pry open the window, moves to jiggle the doorknob.

"No one will answer."

He reacts on instinct, lashing out with his dynamos pinwheeling through the air, only to be stopped with a pulsing blue force field. "Interesting," Glaive says, and the dynamos clatter to the ground, deactivated. "I haven't seen you in a while now."

Add frowns, but doesn't reactivate the fallen dynamos. This Glaive has something different to him. "Are you from further down in Fate?"

Glaive dips his head in a nod. His dumb void cube toys glow in his hand, and Add's dynamos swing back into the air to float next to him. "Where I come from, you haven't been bumping around for years, so to speak," the administrator says, "and I've finally been released from my darn post for long enough to live a few lives of my own."

It doesn't register to Add immediately, because his ankle still aches from the salt and that's more than enough to take his mind off words, but he thinks, and something clicks. "You have the time sickness too," he says, and it strikes a nerve because Glaive physically recoils and turns away. "It affects every time traveller, doesn't it."

"It does." The damned administrator still doesn't meet his eyes. "We each suffer in our own ways. At least yours is bound to incarnate in every timeline."

Add's not quite sure what that means, but he moves on with his questions nonetheless. "So how'd you end up here, and not, y'know, watching over Henir's timespace?"

"Mmm." Glaive beckons with one errant hand, the other still juggling his cubes. "Walk with me."

They leave the abandoned fishing village behind, pacing across the beach leisurely as Add recalibrates his dynamos and Glaive does his shitty cryptic mentor thing. "I was approached by my predecessor," he explains casually, "who informed me graciously that I'd been temporarily released from my post on the grounds of some sort of celebration or other. Some poor fool managed to escape the cycle and our dark lord himself decided to reward us all."

"Huh. So it is possible to escape?"

"Of course, you can't expect to have a magic illness without a counterbalance." Glaive flicks one cube errantly into the sky, where it twists, glows blue, and falls back into his open palm. "There has to be a loophole, some means of balance. This guy must have figured it out faster than the rest of us."

Add nods like he understands, because he really doesn't, and then thinks some more. "What other timelines do I go through?"

Glaive stares at him for a second before he laughs out loud. "If it's any help, the "last" I see you, it's after you've been shot in the chest." He shrugs. "Time is fickle like that. I don't think my timelines will run parallel to yours for a long, long time."

There's a flash of purple in front of them that seems all too familiar, and all too dangerous. Add reacts instantly, slamming into Glaive and tackling him to the ground as a spiked staff slices through the air where they'd been standing a moment ago. "Not bad, not bad," Aisha Landar purrs as she steps out of thin air, propping her staff up on her shoulder, "can't believe we caught two birds with one stone."

"You know, if it weren't for me, your silly little organization wouldn't be a thing," Glaive says, rising to his feet. "Or have you forgotten that your ancestors stole _my_ Seed of Life as the rock upon which to build your towers?"

"Ah, but your pass only held until you escaped the Dark God's prison for you." Aisha's grin is borderline insane now. No, this isn't Aisha anymore (was she even Aisha to begin with?); this is Lady Landar, scion of Seven Tower and heir to an inter-universal mafia. "You're now fair game, and my hunt has just begun."

"Tsk." Glaive rolls up his sleeves with his free hand. The tattoos underneath pulse with faint Henir energy. "Might I remind you that _I_ was one of your seven towers? You may have turned my life's work against me, but I don't need a life any longer. I'm below that now."

He turns to Add for just a second. "Go."

Add doesn't hesitate. He takes off like a bullet while Glaive throws waves of magic against Lady Landar, and she responds in kind. That isn't Aisha anymore, not when her disguise as Aisha melts like ice (_ice_) and the woman with black eyes underneath cackles in glee. He doesn't know if his mentor will hold up against her, only that _he_ won't and that he needs to get away as fast as he can, but the signals are all wrong because _fuck you Glaive for frying the dynamos_, and recalibration is almost complete—

He slams face-first into someone's cloaked chest. As his dynamos whirl into a defensive formation, he looks up into a dark void for a face, a mask that shrouds its wearer in utmost mystery.

But the wearer is no mystery to Add, who has seen him in much less power in much too many timelines. "Hennon," he hisses, holding his dynamos steady. The code seems to be jumbled, and something is undoubtedly wrong, but he can't fix it, not now when Hennon is moving in on him.

Somewhere behind them, Glaive yells. There's explosions. Lady Landar cackles in glee.

"You can run," Hennon says, "but you can't hide. The Lady will always find you eventually."

Add doesn't even wait another heartbeat before he dives head-first into the portal his dynamos open.

(And beyond that, all he knows is that something is terribly, terribly wrong.)

* * *

_Thirteen_

He passes into the world in a daze, not remembering anything past fragments. A too-big hoodie, a too-small heart. He opens his eyes when he dares to, and his first thought is that he is entirely unsafe in this battlefield covered in demons.

Small children aged five should not have to walk through fire, after all.

Then Ara is there, and he's not sure how he knows she's Ara because her dress is entirely too short and entirely the wrong colour, and she fights differently with a spear made of flaming steel, but it's doubtlessly Ara. She throws dark swathes of her magic out like howling wolves, and then the demons are gone, and _it's not safe_, but at least she's here.

She kneels next to him, the power of Eun leaving her while she takes up his hands. He feels so small in her grasp, but he supposes he is. "Are you okay? Where are your parents?" she asks.

"They're dead." He wrenches his hands from her grasp, wipes his eyes on the back of his too-long sleeves. "I shouldn't be alive."

"Oh, sweetheart." Her arms are around him in a second, her spear tucked out of the way at the side. "You should never say that. They may be gone, but it's your turn to live for them. The show must go on."

She rises to her feet, and offers him her hand.

He takes it.

He doesn't know much about this timeline, and he doubts he will. It feels hazy, almost fuzzy in a sense, like a childhood memory slipping from his grasp. Ara tidies up his wounds and leaves him with town elders during the day while she goes out and fights, and he can't help but notice that in this timeline, she's on her own. She takes on her fights alone, and bares her teeth when she grins at the local men, and protects him fiercely as if he were her own child.

Sometimes, he wakes up curled up in the branches of a tree, rolled and tucked into Ara's grey cloak. _I'll be back soon,_ the note in the front pocket says. _Stay safe. Don't leave the tree._ He doesn't know how he'd get down, anyhow, so he doesn't, and waits for her to return.

Ara brings food for him, and water, and finds safe places for them to stay during the nights when they're not in towns. He holds her hand as they walk through flame and blood and cobblestone paths, and somehow he just feels safe around her, safer than he has in years even though this timeline is beyond saving.

(He doesn't tell her that, though. No one listens to a five-year old boy.)

Unfamiliar towns pass him by all too quickly, like a childhood daze he can't quite remember. Whenever exhaustion threatens to drag him down, Ara carries him on her back to the next town, so he can sleep in the warmth of a bed again. She doesn't spoil him, but she doesn't neglect him either, making sure he's fed before she is and cleaning up after his mistakes, and oh boy, does he make a lot of those. She forgives him for faults he didn't even know he had, simply out of the goodness of her heart and because he's nothing but a child.

He's not sure why he's so reluctant to leave her when she tells him to run and be safe. He's safe by her side, isn't he? There's nothing to be afraid of, not when she's here—

The demons flood in from every side, and she grits her teeth and raises her spear.

After that, there's a blur of sounds as she rips wave after wave of magic from the earth, killing the grass around them in the shape of a hurricane with her at the epicentre, and the demons fall in droves but _it's not enough_, it's never enough, he watches as she slips for a second and everything rushes in at her and the scimitar that hooks around her back tears her flesh to pieces and the spear that slashes across her face leaves a gash the size of an ocean that weeps blood, the demons scream but she fights them off, and the moment they fall dead so does she.

"Ara," he wails, grasping at her arm, her shoulder, anything that still pulses with life. Every bit of her is soaked in blood, be it the demons' or her own, and he doesn't want to see the blood anymore, he just wants it to be _over_. "Ara, please don't die!"

She coughs up a chunk of blood. "I told you to run," she says, gripping onto his hand with such resolute strength that Add can feel his fingers go white. "But you're safe now. It'll be okay."

"You're not okay!"

"I didn't think I would be." She tries to smile; it's a facsimile of one at best. "You're young. You're not an old hag with several addictions and a lifetime of regrets under her belt. You deserve to live more than I do, sweetheart. The show must go on."

Her fingers skim across his face, leaving a stream of bloody marks. "_You_ must go on," she whispers, and her hand falls limp.

Add screams until his voice goes hoarse and the world turns grey and shatters around him.

* * *

_Fourteen_

He tries to stay away from them for a timeline, just to see how it works out. Add the hermit, the ascetic, the lost soul seeking a place to sleep at night even though the nearest civilization is barely a stone's throw away. He camps in caves and doesn't light fires and clutches a blanket that he stole to keep himself warm.

The memories of the last timeline have already been lost to him. Something like a dazed childhood slips past him, its features already far, far away. When he thinks about it, the hole in his memory fuzzes at the edges and hurts to approach. Add chalks it up to an anomaly, a mistake in the fabric of the time-space tapestry.

(Never mind the fact that the time-space tapestry _doesn't_ make mistakes.)

Add wanders Elrios like an eidolon, moving in and out of villages and forests with the tide of the winds. He goes where food leads him, where water is plentiful, where he can avoid contact with anyone who can even speak a word to him. He patches up the tears in his jacket with fabric scraps he saves from dumpsters, and climbs into caves behind waterfalls to hide when the need arises.

Funnily enough, the demons don't seem to notice his existence anymore. Flocks of incubi and succubi fly overhead without so much as sparing a single member of their party to pick him off. Maybe it's because he's too weak to even lift a finger without at least two days of sleep beforehand. Maybe it's because he doesn't care for fighting anymore. There isn't any life left in him, much less that which fuels his fighting.

He replaces the parts in each of his dynamos cyclically, fortifying each of them and updating the codes that keep them running. He checks and triple-checks the time travel algorithms, making sure they still function. If he dies here in this timeline from malnutrition, then at the very least he wants to be able to wake up in the next, and without his dynamos he's not sure he'll be able to.

Over the next few days, he flounders. The truth of the matter is that while solitude is something he appreciates, isolation is a fate that no one should have to suffer, especially not that which is self-imposed. The tragedy that comes with mortality is that seeks its kin, which he has graciously denied himself the basic right of knowing in this lifetime.

Add dreams of his mother. They're laying in the grass under her favourite tree, back in Velder. She's humming as she looks through the picnic basket for the book she's been reading. He has his head in her lap. He's laughing.

"Edward, the present is precious in itself," his mother says. "Because without now, there is no today. And without today, there will be no tomorrow. We live each day to see the next, again and again and again. The show must go on."

The tree melts into the wind, and the grass turns to rock, and suddenly Add is five years old in a different way entirely, and instead of his mother's hands in his hair he's got one ear pressed to Ara's rapidly dying heartbeat. Her smile is beatific. "You must go on," she whispers, and dies a million mortal deaths all at once.

Add wakes up half-drowned in a nightmare of blood that isn't his, gasping for a breath he didn't realize he'd lost. Everything hurts. He's severely dehydrated, and yet when he feels his face his sunken cheeks are wet with tears.

It's too much. He can't do this anymore. This isolation, whatever he's trying to do, it's killing him. He _needs_ someone else to talk to, someone to have contact with. His little self-inflicted social experiment comes to a tragic end, with the final verdict of "can't last that long".

Reintegrating himself into society turns out to be harder than expected. For one, he's got no money, and no skills with which to help him earn it. He sits at the side of the road one day and manages to beg half a sandwich and a canteen of water from travellers. It's not much, but it's better than he's been eating.

As he ruminates life back in his cave and munches on what little food he has, he decides that he's not quite ready to stop being a mortal just yet. The lonely existence of a god is still a bit more than he can handle. There's just too many strings attached, too few things he wants to leave behind, sustenance being one of them.

There are voices in the forest nearby. He picks out individual syllables; that sounds like Lu, chortling about dinner; there's Raven replying with something that makes Elesis gag in disgust. Yes, soon he'll be reunited with his friends, the precious people that make it all worthwhile. He's missed hearing their voices, it's been so long. He boots up his dynamos, dusty as they are, because _right_, they haven't met him in this timeline yet, he needs to present himself as a capable fighter, someone who can hold his own in a battle and doesn't need to lock himself away from society to pretend that things are okay—

Something rustles in the bush. He swings his arm out, and three of his dynamos react.

Ara steps into the cave with a smile on her face and a gentle happy swing in her spear, and the moment she does, three dynamos sink into her chest, with a dull _thud, thud, thud._

She falls, and with her, so does Add.

"No, no, no," he says, desperately, running to catch her before she can hit the ground and drive the blade deeper into his heart. "No, Ara, please don't die. Oh god, what have I _done_."

The dynamos, accursed as they've become, pulse with quiet lavender light in sync with Ara's dying heartbeat. "No, it's alright," she says, almost laughs, as blood pools around the edges of the wounds. One isn't too deep; one is lodged in her sternum; one sits directly above her heart. "It was an accident. It's alright." She coughs, and blood stains the front of her white dress. "It's alright."

"It's not okay!" Add has never felt as helpless and as _hopeless_ as now, as Ara bleeds out in front of him and it's _his fault_, all of this is his fault and _he killed her_. "Stay awake, _please_ stay awake, Rena can help you I'm sure of it—"

"She can't." Ara coughs again. This time, her blood drips across the top of one of the dynamos that has become her undoing. "H-how'd you know my name?"

"I—" Add shuts his mouth, unable to find a good answer for her. "In another timeline. You were my friend."

"Ah." She closes her eyes, leaves him one last beatific smile that he's certain will haunt him till the end of his days. "Then I hope in the next life, we can be friends again."

Someone rushes into the cave and screams Ara's name. There are others now, faces and voices that Add recognizes on sheer instinct. He doesn't heed them.

He looks down into Ara's dying face. "Don't go," he whispers.

Ara shakes her head, reaches one bloodied hand up to brush across his cheek (now, where did those tears come from?), and exhales. "I forgive you."

After that there's a blur of things happening. Ara's body goes completely limp in his grasp, and all he can do is watch her be ripped away from him and see their friends scream for her, even though he knows she's gone and it's his fault she's dead, and all he can think to remember is her last words, along with that beautiful smile of hers.

_I forgive you_. What kind of monster is he, that forgiveness has become a privilege? How much has he fallen that just to hear these final few words fills him with emotion beyond what little humanity he still has?

_I forgive you_.

It rings in his bones, as the others grab his shoulders and ask him, _why, how could you?_ and the only thing he can bring himself to say is _I don't know, I don't know, I don't know_. He kneels beside her now cold form, and the one thing that remains on his mind, the one thing that still pains him:

_Where did I go wrong?_

Something like a thought sinks. He wakes up, and then he's falling, falling yet again.

He doesn't know where he'll end up this time.

* * *

**A/N: i am so sorry that this is so late, i was dead tired all through my trip to Japan and more than once i passed out on the train ride home**

**but i'm alive! i survived IB exams (though barely imo) and i went to Japan and ate too much squid sushi for my own good and went to TWO pokemon centres (they do play the pokemon centre music, btw) and nearly had my tissues eaten by a deer. pretty good adventure if you ask me**

**in terms of the chapter, i do have a few notes to make on it:**

**\- the chapter title is a reference to a chapter of _Siddhartha_ by Hermann Hesse. please read it, it's one of my favourite books**

**\- the anthrax (_Anthrax anthrax_) is a fly. it lays its eggs in or near mason bee hives, where upon hatching, the grubs will move into the nest to feed on the bee larvae through osmosis. it's actually kinda cool. please read _The Life of the Fly_ by Jean-Henri Fabre**

**\- i make up these timelines as i go but the first to be planned was timeline thirteen, which was literally one of the first scenes that my friend and i planned for this fic. it's an anomaly because thus far Add has only landed in timelines where Ara's class is Sakra Devanam, but in that one, because Glaive fried his dynamos, he a) turned into his child self (a la Mad Paradox) and b) ended up in a Yama Raja timeline.**

**\- the "Aisha" from timeline nine is Lady Landar from timeline twelve. real Aisha, as a member of the El Search Party, is entirely innocent. without revealing too much about her role, Lady Landar is basically the cosmological equivalent of Aisha from a timeline where the Landar family didn't split from Seven Tower, and the organization never broke. because of the changes in the timeline, she ended up being the prodigy of the Landar family in that generation, but with different parentage and circumstances from Aisha, she's entirely a different character. she'll be taking more prominence in later segments of the story!**

**\- Svalnoreldjergensen is a reference to possibly the most terrifying d&d campaign i have ever embarked on. yes there were ice golems.**

**stay tuned for more!**

**~Marg**


	5. 4: Interlude: Anger

The universe hums as Add drops into the Workshop, falling through nothingness and landing on his knees. Tears are streaming down his face. He won't stop crying. He _can't_ stop crying.

(just like how he _can't_ die, but how she _can_—)

Glaive strides over; he can tell it's Glaive because _who else could it be_, unless it's Seven Tower trying to murder him again but as far as he knows they can't enter this sacrosanct sanctuary. "You know now," he says simply, and Add nods. "How does it feel?"

"Awful," Add croaks, "I want a refund."

This is met with dry laughter, although he hears a hint of amusement in the administrator's voice. "Too late for that. How'd it go?"

This is how it went: Ara died in Varnimyr. Ara died in Elrianode. Ara died in Elysion, in Atlas, in Lanox, in Sander. Ara died at _his hands_, and not once did she stop to blame him. He looks back, and finds a past—if you can even call it that—riddled with bullet holes and scorch marks left by his dynamos.

He's angry, and why wouldn't he be? Why would Ara sacrifice herself so many times, with such conviction, for a complete stranger? "She's a fool," he mutters. "A naive fool, too innocent for her own good, with no sense of self preservation!"

(He holds back the better words to be spoken: brave. Heroic. Selfless. Loving.)

Add closes his eyes, and his hands are still stained with her blood as she bleeds out, and it's _his fault_.

"I killed her," he whispers, hugging his middle and trying not to hurl up what little food he's eaten. "I killed her. _I killed her_."

"And she did nothing to deserve it," Glaive says, although Add can't tell if he's just musing over his misfortunes, or simply making an observation. "So, what do you think you'll do next?"

His voice echoes across the Workshop, carrying down its hallowed halls with no hint of lingering malice. Add looks back at his life, looks back at _fourteen_ timelines destroyed by his ignorance, and takes a shuddering breath.

He looks forwards.

"I'm going to move on," he mutters, "and make things better. I can't make things right, there's no way I can, but…" He looks up into his mentor's eye, as if looking for some form of validation. "If I can even save her, _once_… wouldn't that make things better, even a little?"

This time, he thinks Glaive might be smiling a little, and not unkindly. "You've learned," is all Glaive says. "Walk with me. There's some things you should start learning about your powers."

All Add can do is scramble to his feet and walk.

* * *

Glaive pushes open a door (Add didn't even know doors could exist in the Workshop) and loudly announces, like a ringmaster, "welcome to the control centre."

It's… less empty, for one. There are computers set up across the back of the small room, and that's a relief to Add, who hasn't seen a computer aside from his control console in about ten timelines. Computers run on numbers and sequences and patterns. He can manage them without losing control. He can handle computers.

Timelines run on numbers, but sequences and patterns? Forget it. Add knows better than to search for one in infinity.

"Jumping timelines is an output," Glaive explains as the lights flicker on, "and for now, all of yours have been randomized. You've died through a few timelines, haven't you?" He laughs when Add stays painfully silent. "Don't worry, it's part of the learning process. Your inputs will automatically choose a timeline for you if and when you die in a timeline. It's normal."

"How many times did you have to die before you figured that one out?" Add snarks.

"You know as well as I do that everything we do is based in numbers," Glaive continues, not bothering to grace him with a response. "The basis of the time travel algorithm that we each discovered is a string of numbers that brought us to this goddamn place. You're smart enough to have made that sequence in the first place, so I trust you to be smart enough to run this machine."

He tilts his head errantly at a computer whose screen has begun to light up, and snaps his fingers. "Go ahead. That's yours."

Add stares at him incredulously, and then at the computer. "You're letting me," he says, awestruck, "pick my own adventure?"

Glaive makes a noise that might be a snort. "Just boot it up, kid."

The screen hums pleasantly under Add's fingertips as he hits the startup button. The simple touch blooms a wave of purple that changes the interface to the familiarity of that of his console. "Amazing," is all he has to say. _Individual event toggle. Interaction toggle. Mass timeline search engine. The possibilities really are endless._

It's like he's been in the dark the whole time, which he has been, he supposes, but now he's seen the light and can't go back, won't go back. The ability to control the timelines he's going to opens up so many possibilities, so many versions of Elrios he could visit—

(so many versions of Ara he could kill)

He winces, and Glaive notices. "Something the matter?"

"Just a bit overwhelmed." Add opens up the _spread_ option, which immediately shows him a branching network of how every timeline changes. It opens up in glorious fractals, dividing infinitely to show all the possibilities. "There's so many branches. I'd never be able to explore all of them in one lifetime."

"It really is." Glaive sighs contentedly. "It's quite comforting to look at, once you learn how to. Do you need instructions on that?"

"No, I got it." Add hits the _Zoom to most recent timeline_ button; it zeroes in on a dot coloured blue, surrounded by green ones. A few blue ones pop up nearby, but he doesn't recognize them. He pinches the screen between his fingers, and it slowly zooms out to show two massive branches of timelines he hasn't dared to explore just yet. "Woah. There's three main branches, and I've been just stuck in one?"

"Let me see." Glaive leans down, observes, and chuckles under the mask. "Ah, so you come from a trinity of timelines. You've stayed within one branch, save for one instance."

He points out a timeline in a second branch. Add taps on it to pull up its statistics, reads, and grimaces. "I thought that timeline was an anomaly," he admits. _You must go on_.

"Nothing's ever an anomaly," Glaive chides, but he relents. "Just another branch of timelines, with a different cast of players. Individual events have such large impacts on the future. That particular branch features, in particular, a different appearance of Ara from the one you've typically encountered. Have you realized as much?"

"Yeah." Add thinks back to the hazy childhood memories, to the woman who did so much to keep him safe and ended up bleeding out on the battlefield for him. "She, uh, fought differently."

"That's how it tends to be," Glaive concurs. "I'm willing to bet there are two branches of timelines, if you arrange them in a different fashion, where _you_ have differences as well. I'm thinking… long hair, pulled into a high ponytail?"

"Yeah, no," Add says, thinking about the time his hair got matted into his eyepatch strap, "that would be awful."

"Nonetheless, you should consider investing some time into a different branch of timelines," Glaive says. It sounds like advice he was given a long time ago, and now has to pass on like a bullshit line of mentorship. "Expand your horizons, take a look around. Maybe figure things out a little. Avoid Seven Tower a bit more."

"Right." Add remembers the looming danger he's come to associate with Lady Landar, briefly entertains the idea of asking Glaive, and decides he's not going to risk speaking her name and summoning her to the only truly safe area in the cosmos. "Um. Guess I'll have to choose now."

He looks through the ones that were similar to the "anomaly" timeline, and picks one with a similar risk rating. "This looks okay," he says, not daring to look to Glaive for confirmation. "I'll give it a shot."

"Good." For once, his mentor sounds thoughtful. "That means you're willing to learn."

* * *

**A/N: so i got completely sidetracked and ended up not posting this chapter the same day as the last one, the way it was supposed to be**

**but! better late than never so here we are**

**if my writing for Ventus is inspired by my economics teacher, then my writing for Glaive is inspired by my philosophy teacher. both chaotic, in wildly different manners. both of them are great guys and i learned important life skills in their classes.**

**uh a quick announcement! next chapter, the rating on this fic will be going up, for reasons of both violent and sexual matters. a complete list of potential sensitive topics can be found in the updated prelude/table of contents/the first real chapter of this fic, and i hope all of you read that before you jump into next chapter. it's a lot stronger than what i'm used to writing, but then again, so's the rest of this fic**

**see you all again in half a month!**

**~Marg**


	6. 5: Fifteen

This time:

A burning crimson sky, one that his storm clouds make no difference to. Add lands with a muted thud in a pile of bodies, and wonders what the hell went wrong here, how badly things must have gone if it all went up in smoke before he even arrived. The haze of a nearby flame clears as he lands lucidly, and immediately wishes he still had his fucking scimitar when a demon blade slices through the air at his side and nearly bisects him through the torso.

Gritting his teeth, Add sidesteps the blade, grabbing the demon by the shoulder as it oversteps, and twists. The demon screeches and falls to the ground, where it lies while he stamps its life out with electric footprints.

Except that's not the end. As the demon turns burnt and bloody under his heel, Add has to launch himself into a dangerous dance as a succubus begins to throw her endless supply of shurikens at him. A glitter charges at him, and he fries it whole with a single dynamo before ramming himself behind its blackened body as a temporary shield of sorts. He exhales, sends his dynamos out again, and watches as the gravitational spheres thunder to the battlefield, clearing it of demons in a second.

Where is Ara? He's certain he set his coordinates to her, as an anchor. She's bound to be here somewhere, fighting her own way across the bloody field. Unfortunately, as he rushes out from underneath the glitter he'd used as a shield, a barrage of arrows begins to rain down, ready to sink into him at any moment—

"Rakshasa Inferno!"

A vermillion wave of energy orbs crests up overhead, washing the arrows out of the sky with a mighty burst. They explode into a million splinters as a pinwheeling wonder in black launches herself across the battlefield and stabs her spear directly into the nearest archer. "Get out of here," the woman yells, and Add knows immediately by her voice alone that this _has to_ be Ara. "If you can't fight, run!"

Her shrill scream clears his mind instantly. Add launches another volley of electricity, falling into tandem at her side as they hack their way across the battlefield and into the depths of the demon army. The sound of a horn pierces through the shrill demon screeches, signalling the next wave. Add picks up a fallen sword (curved, the way he likes them) and swings.

The battle becomes a blur after that. The demon sword, burn as it may in his hand, slices through the demon armies like butter. Add electrocutes demons with one hand as he cleaves a path in the other, and watches as Ara whirls across the battlefield, igniting the world in amber flame and ebon spear. She thrusts a hand out and conjures a freaking _black hole_ out of nothing. Demons fly in from every direction, screaming for mercy as the gravitational energy drags them to pieces, and then the energy shuts off and Ara lowers her hand as detached limbs and heads and torsos fall to the ground.

Okay, so this is definitely a different Ara. The Ara that Add has known until now is clean in her work, never getting a speck of demon blood on her pristine white battle robes. He knows and remembers an honourable, selfless woman who was even forgiving to the man who murdered her.

This Ara is ruthless. She cuts down a succubus with a single jab of her spear. Add watches hesitantly, expecting her to deliver the _coup de grace_, but it never comes. The succubus gurgles and gasps for breath that will never return, and Ara moves on, already bloodied and stained and clearly not willing to return to finish the job… or simply willing to just let the demon suffer out its last moments on earth.

Eventually, Add moves in himself, ending the succubus with a single slash to the throat.

The battle seems to clear for the most part, leaving Add and Ara standing some distance away from each other among the bodies. Ara sighs and bends down to flick a blood clot off her leg, as Add begins to traverse the field to join her.

"Stop there." He doesn't expect the spear at his chest, nor the low rasp of Ara's voice. She sounds exhausted. "Drop the sword, and stand your drones down."

He raises his hands defensively, letting the sword drop loose from his hand and clink against some demon's armor on the ground. "Good night," he says to his dynamos, which immediately clatter to the ground harmlessly. He has literally no weapons left, no tricks left up his sleeves. If he dies here, at Ara's hands…

Well. Wouldn't that be something.

"You have nothing to fear from me." He even takes off his eyepatch, letting it flutter uselessly to the ground. "I'm completely unarmed and badly malnourished."

"You dropped out of the sky," Ara says. Her spear scrapes against his sternum, the feeling echoing loosely into his chest cavity. "And then you proceeded to butcher the group of demons that have been terrorizing this part of town for the past two months. I think I have every right to be wary of you when you approach me the way you've approached the demons."

"Alright, then I won't." He keeps his hands in the air, looks behind him, and sits on a fallen demon's armor. Ara stares down at him coldly, like she doesn't know why he's here. That's fair. She doesn't. "I'm fighting the demons, just like you are. I don't want to make an enemy out of someone who could be an ally."

A moment passes. Then another. Then Ara swings her spear back, grips it tighter, and the grim expression falls off her face. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," she says quietly, before standing up, tall and proud. "I hope you're telling the truth, stranger."

"Add," he croaks, as she turns away and leaves. "My name is Add."

(If she hears him, she gives no indication of it.)

* * *

Working entirely alone is a bit of a shock. Add doesn't go hunting after Ara, reasoning that their paths will cross eventually, but what really stings is that none of their other friends appear. What's the point in looking out for Lady Landar if the one person she could reasonably masquerade as in most timelines isn't even around?

He runs several calculations, doesn't come up with anything, and gives up trying to locate their other friends. In this timeline, as in the timeline he called an anomaly, Ara is a loner, and so looking for the rest of the El Search Party is counterproductive. He goes into towns and leaves with stories of the queen of the night, a woman who enchants and enthralls, but always leaves by dawn's first light. She seems like a dark dream, or perhaps a beautiful nightmare, by the way the storekeepers' tones always grow soft and passionate when they speak of her.

Like some sort of fucked-up bug hunter, Add follows the flocks of demons as they come and go, sweeping as many as he can when it's safe to do so. The concentration of demons is _highly disproportionate_ to the danger rating that he saw back in the Workshop, and sometimes all he can do is stand with his back to a town gate and sling globes of burning plasma into the incoming waves and pray for the best. The people of this Elrios live in fear, but they're used to it.

(That's what terrifies him the most.)

The next time he runs into Ara, she's not even truly Ara. He's helping an old woman evacuate her home to escape the incoming wave of demons when the ground rumbles. It takes only a moment for him to adjust, but the old woman's legs give way and she crumples to the ground, and a demon he can't put a name to bursts from the ground and is immediately sniped out of the air with a swirling dash of magical energy.

The white glint of Eun's hair and tails against Ara's dark ensemble is a shocking contrast, especially when Add is so used to seeing her in vivid vermillion and demure white. She channels Eun in all the same ways and yet so differently, throwing blasts of wind and taking back precious territory in a fight to keep the demons out of town. "Get her to safety," she shouts, before disappearing in a flash of black and white.

Add hauls the old woman up and carries her to where the other townspeople are retreating, stepping over fallen demon bodies and running to hand her to a waiting young couple. "Stay together, and don't panic," he tells the townspeople, and then he boots up his dynamos and flies back into the fray.

He crashes through the air and finds give when his foot connects with the face of a waldo, sending the demon sprawling back with hundreds of volts of lightning arcing across its torso. An incubus charges at him, and he just raises a hand and fries it in a prism of electricity between his dynamos. "Can't learn to leave these people alone, will you?"

The incubus makes a broken gurgling sound and falls to the ground. Add picks up its sword, the handle still warm to the touch, and gets to work.

Ara has gone missing among the swarm of demons, or maybe it's just because Add can't stop to think of where to look. There's a million things to focus on in the battle; a glitter swings its axe at him and he can barely block it and not drop his sword from the immediate recoil. He flicks the sword up blindly, wrenching the axe from the glitter's claws, and thrusts the blade directly into its chest. A bloody cough rattles from its jaws; he lets go of the sword and moves on.

When the adrenaline takes over, everything else stops existing. Add stops feeling the cuts across his knuckles, or the glare of the sun in his damaged eyes, or the bruises that litter his limbs. It's not quite the same feeling as the bloodlust he once relied on to survive, but it keeps the pain at bay and lets him keep fighting, keep these people safe, so he embraces it and wades on through the battle.

Slowly, like a one-man hurricane, he pushes the line back, away from the town. Explosions go up in the distance, like a chain of fireworks with a familiar magical signature. He grins and follows them.

Ara stands at the epicentre of her personal earthquake, magic flowing in and out of her constantly. She holds her hand out in front of her and waits for the glowing arc of energy to build up before releasing it, watching in satisfaction as it clashes with the demons in a deadly magical wave. "There isn't much left to clean up," she says in a voice that isn't entirely her own, and that's how Add knows that Eun is in control. "Hmph. Are you joining me or not?"

Add bares his teeth and lets his dynamos swirl around him in response.

Together, they push the line back even further, gaining precious distance away from the town. Add throws out wave after wave of electricity, feeling all of his hair stand on end, as Ara dances between the demon forces and makes quick work of them with her spear. It's almost frightening how well their fighting styles mash together—the combination of her magic with his electricity and her spear and his sword sweep the demons before they can even react.

The last glitter commander falls at Ara's hands, as an opening appears and she takes it with glee. Her spear goes through its back and out its abdomen, and she yanks it out while it's still dripping with black blood. "Good riddance," she says, as Eun's powers dissipate and her tails seem to shrink into nothing, "don't the demons ever get tired of dying?"

"Guess not." Add steps over the body of the demon commander gingerly; Ara notices his hesitation and just kicks it aside. "So, uh…"

It's strange to be standing next to her as a fellow fighter again. This Ara is so different from the demure, graceful girl he thought he knew. This Ara is unafraid to leave herself to the imagination, and gladly flaunts her weapons and sadistic streak almost more than her body. How can he speak to her when the last time he met her, she could have killed him?

"Your magic," he hears himself say, "it's very powerful."

Ara smiles. Something shifts in her stance, in her demeanour, in the way she holds her spear. "Thank you. I learned it from the dead."

That's nothing short of a horrific statement, and it must show on his face, because Ara laughs and strides over to him. "Add, right? Some of my friends in other villages tell me you've been asking after me. Care to spend some time with me?"

The lilt of her voice, the way she brushes—no, _caresses_—his face so tenderly, it feels so strange. This doesn't feel like Ara, even though her welcoming smile is the same as ever. Add takes the hand that she holds out to him and shakes it, and becomes friends with a stranger once more.

Maybe they're still a little short of friends. Ara lets go of his hand much too quickly, and Add is left longing for her warm touch despite the drying blood on their hands. "We should start heading back to the village," she says, plucking her spear out of the ground. "We should make sure the townspeople are alright."

"Yeah," Add says, wondering when he became part of that precious "we" she speaks of, "we really should."

* * *

The queen of the night gains a loyal ally almost overnight, a champion who will fight the demons at her side without hesitation. Not many have lasted long before as her partner on the battlefield, and fewer have lasted as her partner in bed.

Add understands that, of course. Even in a world unlike any he's been in before, Ara is still Ara, and she has a high standard to keep for herself and others. He notices this early on in their newfound travelling partnership, in the way she'll easily turn capable fighters down and encourage them to stay safe and out of the way. She never speaks about it, and he never asks.

It's not his place. Not yet, anyhow.

Eun makes it clear from day one that she doesn't trust him. Add becomes quickly acquainted with the millennium fox spirit and her choice list of words to describe him: little boy. Naive. Cowardly. Reckless. It sounds suspiciously like the angry rant he'd once used to describe Ara, so he stays calm and endures the verbal lashing, knowing fully well that he deserves every moment of it.

No one can deny, though, that Add and Ara fight like gears fitted together, clicking in tune and moving towards a common goal with frightening efficiency. Even when they're separated on the battlefield, they constantly have each other's backs. Add sweeps a hand out and sends burning plasma into the rotting bodies of the demons as Ara snipes them out of the sky with concentrated blasts of magic. They approach fighting in such wonderfully different ways that one can immediately go on the offensive the moment the other moves to defend, and vice versa.

Ara fights like she's dancing, slipping between adversaries with fleeting footsteps and rhythmic strikes of her spear. It's as if she's got some sort of magical music playing directly into her ear, thundering out a beat that only she can hear. Any stragglers in her path not dancing along are immediately torn to pieces with either her spear or her magic, or sometimes both.

One night after a skirmish, they're sitting down around a fire and bandaging each other's wounds when Add remembers that he has questions to ask. "Do you have some sort of music playing while you fight?" he asks, and wilts a little when she giggles. "Sorry. Just wanted to ask."

"No, it's alright. I've had people wonder that before." She slips a hand over her ear and something _clicks_ into her palm as she takes off her golden earring. "Usually I just tell people that I got this enchanted several years ago to play music, or sometimes I'll say that Lord Eun did it for me, but the truth is, I don't listen to music while I fight."

"You have such a strong rhythmic sense," Add says, "I can see it in the way you fight. It looks like you're dancing."

Ara leans back against the tree and smiles. "Ah, well, I was trained to play multiple instruments when I was younger," she admits, "so that might factor in. I always had two left feet, though, so dance wasn't really my thing as a child." She hikes up her skirt on one side, and Add can't help but be transfixed as the disappearance of the dark fabric reveals a sallowed bruise on her otherwise flawless porcelain skin. "Fighting helped a lot. I learned to slow dance after I figured out fighting."

"Mmhmm." Add pushes their shared jar of herbal cream to her. "So if I asked you to play the zither _right now_, could you do it?"

She just rolls her eyes in response. "Don't press your luck, darling."

And as she continues to patch herself up, Add listens to the calming crackle of the fire, stares at the sparks that fly away into the night, and reminds himself that he's been very, _very_ lucky thus far, and it would do him well to take her advice and not tempt Fate any more than he already has.

* * *

"To your left," Add yells, throwing out a dynamo like a flying taser and catching a glitter assassin by the throat. It slams to the ground jittering, the knife that would have been lodged in Ara's shoulder carelessly forgotten. "Stay on the lookout, there are glitters everywhere!"

Halfway across the battlefield, Ara rips her spear from the body of an incubus and buries it into the puffing abdomen of a waldo. "Got it," she shouts, leaping aside from the gush of black blood from the demon's wound.

This battle is no less intense than any other they've undertaken since they joined hands as travelling allies. In fact, Add thinks the demons have only redoubled their efforts and begun sending in more of their strongest soldiers since then. They're constantly encountering new demons that he's never seen before, and he dreads having to write down new entries of demon varieties in his notebook nearly every night.

At times like this, when every step means wading through mangled demon bodies and splashing blood up to his knees, Add takes a breath and he—

He fights. He's prone to losing any sword given to him, so he'll just take one from a felled demon and fight his way through. He loses himself to the inhumane drive to protect, to keep something (_someone_) aside from himself alive. Sometimes it keeps him alive in the process. He lives with it and keeps fighting.

Because now he has something to fight for. Ara showed him the war-torn cities of this horrible world, and it only took one scared, scarred child for him to cave in. She'd waited for him while he'd excused himself to discreetly throw up in the toilet at the back of an inn, and afterwards she didn't ask any questions, just patted him on the back and offered him some water when he'd emerged a little pale and shaken.

(Because he looked at a dying child, and saw himself, aged six, with a collar around his neck and no will to live. Because he needs to stop that from happening again to yet another child, and fighting the demons is the best way he can do that.)

Their paths fall in tandem again. Add plants both feet solidly behind Ara, puts his back to hers, and summons his dynamos around him. While he hasn't fully developed this new battle protocol yet, he's got some ideas he's dying to test out, and this is the perfect opportunity to do it.

He pulls up his console with one hand, punches a rapid-fire code into it, and hits the enter button. Nothing happens at first, but then a wave of static jitters across his hands in a faint violet, and he grins and counts off the seconds until the demons will be affected. The moment he gets to zero, the nearest ones grab at their heads in pain, shrieking until the sound drowns out the tide of blood and their voices give out.

A legion of demons falls at his feet, and Add can't help but feel proud.

"Nice one," Ara shouts over her shoulder, swiping a glitter's axe aside with her spear. "What was that?"

Add grins. "Just testing some new battle commands." He throws his console back in his pocket, plucks his sword off the ground next to him, and readies a stance for fighting. "Haven't named it yet. Got any suggestions?"

Of course, all of that is a talk for later. The next wave of demons approaches, and right now, they don't have any leeway to give. There's a town not a hundred metres away, and they are the last line of defense. So Add swings his sword as Ara swings her spear, and he showers them in gravitational spheres as she does with deadly energy projectiles, and they protect what means everything to them. The world hasn't fallen just yet, and that means there's still hope for it.

There's a strangled scream behind him, and Add turns around just in time to see a glitter assassin pull its knife out of Ara's back and raise the blade for a second strike. Ara crumples like she's made of fabric, and Add can only scream and toss his sword directly at the glitter, knocking it back a fair distance from her so he can properly fry it to death.

"Ara," he chokes, reaching to pull her up and prop her against his knee. While the wound isn't deep, if she stays on the ground like this she'll fade before he can get her to safety, he does _not_ want a repeat of that timeline where she bled out in his arms. "Stay with me here. Stay awake, alright? I'll get you back to town."

"They closed the gates and headed to the bunkers." She winces a little and goes a little paler in the face when he lifts her up and blood starts to trickle from the wound and rust over. "Don't worry about me. I'll be fine." Her eyes go wide. "Add, look out!"

He turns just in time to catch the flash of a glitter's blackened knife across his arm. Only the goodness of Fate makes him turn his body at just the right time, catching the blade against his shoulder instead of his neck. He screams in pain and kicks out, and the electricity surrounds his foot and blasts the demon back into the unfortunately placed blade of the demon behind it.

With no time to waste, Add picks up Ara and runs. It's cowardly, it's awful, they're going to _die_ and he knows they won't make it back in time, but he needs to buy time to secure her wound, and maybe his own. She presses gently against his injured shoulder, staunching the bleeding, but clutches helplessly to the uninjured one, unwilling to let go.

The message couldn't be clearer.

_I do not want to die._

The gate comes up in all its iron-cast glory, and Add feels himself let Ara to the ground. "Stay still, he says, propping her up against the door and reaching into one of his pockets. There's a torn eldrasil leaf in it, back when he was taking them on Rena's prescription. He presses it to the wound on Ara's back and tears the hem off his jacket to tie around the makeshift poultice in lieu of bandages. "Try not to move too much. It'll make it worse."

Ara exhales shakily and nods. "What are you going to do?"

Add turns around. His shoulder's still bleeding, and by the lady of El does it hurt, but there's nothing to do about that now. The demons are starting to approach, like vultures circling a pair of dying animals. He doesn't feel great about being prey. "Protect you, of course."

After that, the battle becomes a blur of empty faces and shattered weapons. Cold steel, while powerful on its own, is fragile when an angry less-than-mortal man is pouring thousands of amps of electricity through them. Add screams until his throat burns and slashes until his own blood is pouring down his arm and fights until his dynamos threaten to melt, and then he keeps going and fights some more, all to protect the one person left binding him to this pathetic mortal coil.

It becomes a fight not to stay alive, but a fight to keep Ara from harm. Into this fight Add pours all of his anger, all of his regret, all of his fear of losing her one more time. He purges all of that from himself and loses it in the tide of battle one more time for a totally different reason. Bloodlust is the last of his problems when he's the only thing left between a hurricane of a demon army and Ara.

He reaches out one shaking finger, directs his overheating dynamos to fry the last approaching incubus and lets his hand fall as the incubus spazzes out, folds its wings and crashes to the ground. The adrenaline fades, and Add turns his back on the bloody, empty countryside to turn back to Ara.

She's dozed off—a minor side effect of the eldrasil, one that Add found horrible when he used to take it for his eye. With what feels like the last of the strength in his bones, he kneels down, ignoring the creak of his knee, and starts to scoop her up behind her back and under her knees.

The hairpin of Eun, askew in her bun, glows faintly. "Silly boy," the millennium fox says (with considerable amusement, Add notes), "you could have waited for me to heal her. As her chosen guardian deity, I do have that power."

"I know." He stands up straight, and miraculously, he doesn't wobble with her in his arms. "But then the demons would have come, and we would have both died." No point in making a repeat of multiple timelines from before. "This was the safest choice to make, to make sure she'd be okay."

"Hmmph." The hairpin flares up a little defiantly. "So you'd risk death by overexertion to make a choice you'd consider safe?"

"I never said it would be safe for me," Add says. "Only for her."

Eun says nothing as the gates finally open and Add brings Ara into the warmth of the afternoon sun.

* * *

In the nights they spend in towns, Ara disappears.

She's not obligated to stay at Add's side, of course. Ara's a grown woman who wields a spear nearly twice her height with lethal accuracy. He doesn't need to be afraid for her sake when he's the fragile one with a slew of problems and a supernatural illness.

But that doesn't mean he doesn't worry. Some nights, they stay in the rooms above taverns, and he'll watch her dance with men and women alike. She speaks lust like it's her native language, and disappears into the attic with her dance partner of the night, leaving Add to pay her bill quietly and sip his glass of mead in the corner.

One morning after such an eventful night, he catches her digging into her backpack and bringing out a tiny glass bottle. She frowns as she uncorks it, dumps out two little heart-shaped seed pods, and dry swallows them unceremoniously. "I'll need to visit an apothecary one of these days," she says, voice hoarse. Add heard her screaming the night before. "I'm running out."

"Medicine you take?"

She smiles wryly. "You could say that. It's called silphium."

He learns from the apothecary's assistant in the next settlement that silphium is worth its weight in silver for its culinary, contraceptive and aphrodisiac properties. He watches as Ara quietly buys another tiny bottle's worth of silphium seed pods and hands an impressive stack of ED to the apothecary. He says nothing.

There's a certain pattern to her dancing, too. Ara dances like she fights, with agility and grace. Her body becomes her sacred weapon, and it's only a matter of time before she finds someone at the next bar in the next town to wield it with her. Add watches as she telegraphs her next move—a gentle hip bump that turns into a delicious grind of fabric upon bare thigh. There doesn't need to be music, only darkness and space for her to work her magic. The night is her domain.

And it's unfair that Add feels this way, feels so protective of her when in this lifetime she's not a sullied lily. In this lifetime, Ara is beauty and grace, yes, but she is also a woman of the night. She is Shakespeare's Dark Lady incarnate, with the touch of baby's breath and the whisper of a scarlet rose. Add watches from his corner as she dances the night away, and wilts.

It starts with something a little different: a hand that lingers too long to wrap a bandage or apply an ointment; a brush of their shoulders that seems more than friendly before they say their goodnights and head to their respective rooms. He catches himself watching her dance from the corner of the room, wondering what it would be like to sway in time with her; he finds himself staring at her bare back when they have to share a room, thinking about her soft body in his hands.

On a beautiful night like this, when her dance partner books it for the door the moment her hand leaves theirs, Add knows what he has to do.

When he leaves his corner, Ara's eyes flicker to him, even though she's obviously hurt and that shines through first. "Add?" she asks, whispers. "What are you doing?"

"Dancing." He takes her hands, one at a time, and entangles his fingers with hers. "I want you to teach me how to dance."

The storm of confusion that clouds her eyes fades, and she smiles. It's a pretty smile. "Of course."

She puts one of his hands on her hip, the way it should be, because he knows nothing about the art of dance. Her own hand, she rests gently on his shoulder, pulling him closer.

Someone is playing the fiddle, ascending like the shrill aria of a siren. The ghost of a smile lines Ara's expression. "What?" Add asks, as she drums her fingers playfully against him.

"Nothing. It's just that I remember this piece." She presses her face against his shoulder, so that he can feel her laughter against his collarbone. "It's from a symphonic suite called Scheherazade. It's beautiful."

"I'm not really a music person," he says, "but is Scheherazade from the Thousand and One Nights?"

"Knowledgeable, I see."

"I do a lot of reading."

She guides him into what might be a gentle sway, each breath stagnant in the dark of the tavern. Around them, voices melt into an incoherent whisper as the fiddle dives into impossible heights, and Add and Ara dance through the night. She steps to the side, and he follows, gingerly mimicking her every movement as the music pulls them closer and closer.

Ara is smiling. She looks like she's having fun. Her eyes are so, so very rustic and golden in the candlelight from the bar. The fiddle sings to the beat of her heart against Add's chest. He sees the thin line of kohl where she's flicked it up from the corners of her eyes, sees the concealer that sculpts a clean line against her black cherry lipstick. He wonders what it tastes like.

He's seen a few of her partners do this before, but he's clearly never tried it himself. Then again, there is a first time for everything. He tilts his head down, at just the right angle, and presses his lips to hers.

The universe stops at their feet. They stop dancing, everything goes still, the tavern ceases to exist around them. Ara lets go of his shoulder to pull him closer to her, to part her lips just in the _slightest_ way, and that's it, has crashed, he swears he can see stars in that moment. She's doing something positively _devastating_ with her tongue that makes his chest burn, and he thinks he might just drown in it.

The fiddle croaks to a slow halt. The stars descend in a cosmic tapestry in Ara's eyes. Add feels like he's about to burst.

"Not bad for a first-timer," she says quietly, tilting her head sideways curiously. Add seriously ignores the urge to kiss her again, to taste satisfaction on her lips as well as his own, but he holds back, just as he holds back the heat in the pit of his stomach. "Ah, I should pay for my drink—"

"I'll pay." Add doesn't know what it is that changes when he lets go of her hand and her hip, but something in him immediately growls for contact. "Don't worry about it."

Ara smiles. "Thanks. I'll be in my room."

She disappears up the stairs in a streak of black.

Add quietly goes to the bar, drowns the last of his worries with the last of his honey mead, and pays for both their drinks. He's not drunk, just miserable, and there is a cold patch the size of Ara's hand on his shoulder. He wants to feel her warm and alive in his grasp again.

_I'll be in my room._ Was that an invitation, or is Add just imagining things? He thinks about the way she moved, how she slipped her tongue past his lips without a second thought, and climbs up the stairs, all at once sobered.

This is ridiculous. Lust clouds the judgement just as alcohol does. He thinks about consent, and safety, and about how his parents' story began. Ara, as he knows her, speaks to her enemies with ice, to her allies with fire and to her partners with silk. Where does that leave him tonight?

Add blinks, and he's standing in the doorway of Ara's room, one hand outstretched to knock. He doesn't know what he's doing, and frankly, he should not be here. Every muscle in his body screams, though for what, he doesn't know.

He knocks.

"_Come in,"_ Ara says daintily from inside. Against his better judgement, Add pushes open the door to find her as a work of art.

There's only one candle lit in the room, but its glow is more than enough to turn her porcelain skin to warm flame. Her hair falls luxuriously around her shoulders; she's taken it out of her bun, and let it tumble down in a cascade of jet. It blends into the lacy black _thing _she's wearing, whatever it may be. He knows it's lingerie. He doesn't know much else.

Add tries not to burn down right there and then.

"I thought you wouldn't come," Ara remarks.

"I thought you couldn't want me to." This is met with a smirk, to which Add snorts. "Hey, it's not like I'm experienced with this."

"I know." Ara pats the bed where she's sprawled out like a black snake. "Come here."

He sits down and sinks into the plush comforter. "You can sleep in this?"

When she puts her hand on his thigh and smiles, it sends a shockwave up his spine. "I can do more than just sleep in it." Her grin is nothing less than feral. "Of course, that all depends on you."

She kisses him, slow and languidly. This is a language Add has yet to learn to speak: the language of lust, conveyed entirely through the body. It's powerful and says a lot more than words do, especially when Ara is the one speaking it.

"This is okay, right?" she asks quietly, running her fingers down his back. "You're not uncomfortable?"

"If it were, I wouldn't be here," he responds.

After that, it's all a blur of friction and touch and muffled cries. Ara pushes him down into the mound of pillows, and he topples willingly under the pressure. Her hands seem to be everywhere at once, igniting flames in him that have never been lit. Something smoulders in her eyes and rains ash like the first snow.

Add is entirely a stranger to sex, but he isn't stranger to the feeling of euphoria. It had been lost to him when he lost his bloodlust, but now, as Ara makes him feel things that _no one_ should feel, he finds that adrenaline has been restored to him. Ara rolls her hips, and he makes a noise that isn't quite human. The carnal rush of heat to his core is absolutely _dirty_.

In a strange way, though, this is just another battle, another war to fight. Ara wields her second-most powerful weapon against him in a battlefield that is almost entirely hers. Add fights to breathe as his chest tightens and Ara's sharp nails dig into his skin. He lets out a decadent groan, something squelches obscenely between them, and she shamelessly spreads her legs a little wider, opens the angle just a little more until he can feel the pulse in her thighs.

Something in him screams for release. He lets go, and muffles his scream into Ara's shoulder as he climaxes and she grinds down even harder. Fire floods his veins, and then it's over just as quickly, leaving his limbs crumbling into ash.

"What," he gasps, breathless, "was that?"

Ara rolls off him lazily, a wet stain on the hem of her lacy little jacket. He's still not sure what it's called. "That was the best sex you'll ever have," she says, a lilt in her tone that leaves Add thinking that she's not quite sated. "Do you want to go again?"

"Not right now." His entire body aches all over, still sore in the wake of pure euphoria. "A bit tired."

"Ah, okay." Ara looks disappointed, but not surprised; it's like she knows she's his first time and he's terribly inexperienced, but wanted something more anyways. "How do you feel?"

Add closes his eyes and manages a smile. "Tired," he admits, "but... that was good. Is it bad that I want to do it again?"

He feels Ara laugh against his chest, a little weary and a little sweet. "No," she says, "that's not bad at all."

"I meant what I said, though," he says, "about the dancing. I want you to teach me how to dance."

Ara raises an eyebrow. "What kind of dancing," she asks, "the dancing downstairs, or what we did just now?"

"Both." Something prickles in Add's fingertips, a sudden desire to reach out to comb through Ara's dark hair. "I'm a good learner."

"I'll hold you to it."

* * *

After that:

It's easy to settle into a pattern. During the day, they fight demons, interrogate thieves, hunt down fallen generals. At night, Ara teaches Add to dance, to play in the shadows, to practice love as an art. She climbs into bed with him and reminds him that is okay to _feel_, to _indulge_, to _crave more_. Ara doesn't teach him what love is, but she teaches him how to love, and that's just as powerful to him at the end of the night. They stop finding two rooms at inns and settle for one instead. Slowly, the tension in his muscles eases, leaves him more pliant in her hands as she teaches him more and more games of love.

They don't have sex every night, of course. Some battles take stronger tolls on them than others. On those nights, they sit on the bed side by side and bandage each other's wounds instead. Sometimes one or both of them just isn't in the mood. It happens. They sleep it off and continue the next morning (and the next night) as usual.

The nice thing about their arrangement, though, is that there aren't any strings attached. Add likes it this way because it's not like he has to bury the bodies of all the demons he slaughtered in the morning. The worst he has to do is look at the train of bites that Ara's left across his collarbones and sigh, because somehow the bruises he puts into her skin never seem to last longer than a few hours. By the time they wake up, she will already be flawless again, smirking as he tugs his hoodie up a little higher to hide the bites.

"Oh shut up," he snaps when she laughs at a particularly large one, "_you_ put that there."

"You should consider investing in a higher collar," Ara snickers, unbuttoning a single fabric notch on her collar to expose the bruised skin there where he'd left his mark last night. It's already fading at the edges, unlike the dark splotches that mottle his skin. "Does _wonders_ for keeping the hickeys hidden."

He _does_ invest in a higher collar. Between battles, he redesigns his armor, finding moonstone plating from all over Elrios to line his new pieces. Ara watches over his shoulder as he feeds strips of lighting between the dark iron plates, and not-so-subtly implies that she can't wait to light him up herself. The collar isn't high enough to cover his blush, unfortunately.

If Ara notices the scar around his neck, she says nothing. She likes to leave her marks across his decollete, sometimes even across his shoulders. It's hard to tell where her scars come from—frankly, he would not be surprised if most of them came from her lovers and not from the battlefield, since she likes to play rough and likes it more when others play rough.

Sex, in her eyes, is a game to play. She teaches it to him as she might a game of chess, techniques and gambits and etiquette. She'll open with a low murmur, a kiss, a brush of her fingers against the flat of his stomach. Before he knows it, she'll have him trapped, desperately aching for her teasing touch again. He loves and hates that she knows exactly how to make him beg and scream for her to do something, anything, to him. It's a dangerous game. He wonders when he'll stop being a student.

"Oh, this?" She lifts the hem of her little black lace jacket. "It's called a negligee. Looks nice, doesn't it?"

"It does," Add agrees, taking the edge of the fabric in his hand before lifting it. "Would look nicer on the floor, though."

Ara laughs and pushes him against the bed, straddling him and leaning leisurely on his chest. She looks so whimsical, her childish tone and daring smile a stark contrast against her dark eyes and lacy lingerie. "Would it?"

He grins and pulls her in.

Today, she teaches him a game of words. Sure, Ara's got a lovely speaking voice, but hearing her ravish him with praise is a whole other experience. She really does have Add wrapped around her little finger, considering the way he jolts and climaxes the moment she whispers his name like a prayer.

"You're getting very good at this," she laughs afterwards, face tucked against his bare chest. Her breath comes in little gasps, the aftershocks of their games still running through her as they do him. "Who would have known you're actually not half bad for a partner?"

"You underestimate me, Ara. I'm wounded." He flicks her hair aside; she just pouts and blows a raspberry at him. "I did tell you I'm a good learner. I pick things up quickly."

"Mmm." She climbs up a little higher onto him and kisses him slowly, languidly. Add has always liked to kiss her, not just as a precursor to sex. Ara turns every bit of contact into art, and every kiss she initiates is a flawless masterpiece. He'd told her so once, and she'd laughed at his prose and just kissed him again to shut him up. "I don't just mean that. Usually, my partners don't last long as you do, and even though you look as thin as a twig, I don't think I've found anyone who's as gently strong as you are yet. It might just do us both some good to go exclusive."

Add snorts. "I don't last long," he argues, "remember last Wednesday, when you sat on my face?"

"Duly noted." Her laughter is like water trickling and bubbling down the mountainside, clear and crisp. "You ever think about settling down, finding a place to live?"

He thinks about it for a moment, remembers the time sickness that plagues him, and shakes his head. "I'd have to wait until the war ends, I guess."

"Ah, but that's still a lifetime away," she says wistfully, and isn't she right about that. "You know as well as I do that the war won't end soon, Add." She looks pensive for a moment, eyes not quite focused, before she smiles softly again. "Maybe if it gets safer there, I'll take you to the village I grew up in. It's pretty empty now, but it's up on a mountain and demons wouldn't bother us there."

"You speak of your childhood home with such fondness, but you don't love it," Add observes. "Bad memories?"

Ara smiles wryly, but it's not unkind. "I suppose," she says. "It's not like you have the fondest memories of your childhood, either."

"Touché."

"But I guess it's really the detachment." Her golden eyes are piercing in the way that reminds Add of another Ara, several timelines ago, glaring down the demons in a ruined elven village. "You and I, we're similar in that way. We had to grow up too quickly. The people who were allowed to remain children… Maybe they know how to love a memory that's long slipped us by."

The way she says it with such conviction sends a shiver down his spine.

* * *

Add likes this new life of his, much better than trying to murder demons for the adrenaline, anyhow. He gets the same rush of euphoria when he lays his head on Ara's bare chest, or when she lowers her voice to a purr and pushes her hands against him, pushes them both into the depths. What's the point in killing and killing and killing when he could die a million deaths in her arms and feel just the same?

They try new things often, some that Add is more than willing to experiment with, and some which he hesitates to try. It's good to know that some lines that he draws are the same that Ara refuses to cross, that there's a level of unspoken trust in their relationship, whatever it may be. Toys are okay; harnesses and constraints are not. Praise is more than welcome on both sides; degrading words make them both shrink away.

But it's all good. They laugh it off and silently swear to never try it again, and move on. Ara teaches him everything she knows, and when he's finally confident in his ability to please her just as much, he does, ravishing her just as she's ravished him. The night falls away, and by dawn they lay sore and wide awake in each other's arms, sweaty and spent and _alive_.

(He has never felt so alive until now, not even on the battlefield. It fills him with wonder every time he lays down next to her.)

They dance outside of the bedroom, too. In the firelight of many a tavern, Ara pauses to drop a request with a musician before returning with the brightest smile to Add's side, taking up his hand and shoulder and spinning around like tomorrow will never come. Some nights, after the worst battles have been sealed away under poultices and bandages, Ara will hum to herself, and he'll get up and take her hand, and they'll dance the last of their worries away, knowing simply each other's warmth and presence.

The music and the dancing starts to get to Add in another way, too. He tries the test command again, and in a spurt of inspiration, decides to sync it to a beat, a sound, a rhythm. He works on it in the mornings, because heaven knows he'd rather be in bed with Ara than compose music late at night.

"What have you got there, darling?" Ara asks one morning, voice still groggy with sleep as she lifts her head from against his hip and blinks lazily at his glowing console. "Didn't take you for a morning person."

"I'm really not. It's because I'd rather spend our evenings doing _something else_, so I guess morning composition is a thing now." He plucks out one of his earpieces and hands it to her, then turns the volume down and hits play. The faint sound of a piano refrain echoes in his ear and in hers. "I'm setting my experimental attack command to some music."

Ara sits up a little, props her head on his shoulder, and presses the earpiece in a little more. Add can't help but fixate on the sunrise glow on her exposed skin, the light hugging her form through the crack in the curtains and turning her breasts into a labyrinth of shadows.

"This sounds," Ara says, and then her voice trails off like she's slipping back into a restful sleep, "this sounds like the lullaby my mother used to sing me when I was young."

Add freezes, and then he _freezes_, because he thinks of a cave in the ice and another sleepy, shaking voice that sang him this tune. "Oh," is all he manages to say, because Ara doesn't know that he's known her for so many lifetimes already.

"I can sing it for you, if you'd like," she suggests quietly. The milky haze in her tone and in her eyes tells Add that she's still dreaming, that her mind is still somewhere else. "It's called the Moonlight Lullaby. My mother wrote it for me when I was young."

She really is beautiful in this morning sun.

"I think I'd like that," Add says, tucking his console away and leaning back.

As Ara serenades him with a song long lost to time and war, he slips away into a world where the stars shine like in her lullaby, where there's not so many clouds that he can't see the moon that she sings of.

* * *

Another one of their major tasks is hunting down demon generals, especially the more dangerous ones. Since Add and Ara have built up a reputation among the surviving parts of Elrios as the toughest, meanest fighters, they've also built up a reputation as the ones who need to clean up the worst of the troubles. Ara keeps a little notebook in an inside pocket of her bag, lined with names of the demon generals that she's had to execute over the years. She reads it when she thinks Add isn't looking, but he notices, and wonders how to bring it up with her.

He knows very little about her past (and she knows even less about his), but he knows that her brother was possessed by a demon, and massacred her family, leaving her as the only survivor. He's heard this story before, from the determined face of a much younger and much more innocent girl. Her brother's still out there, maybe possessed. Maybe she wants to see him again. Maybe she wants revenge. It wouldn't be out of character for Ara, this Ara who would burn the world down if it meant an end to the demon invasion.

As they sit in the meager shade of a balding tree, Ara takes out her little notebook again and plucks the tiny pen out of the leather loop at the side. "Alastor," she sighs, crossing off another name—that of a willowy demon in flaming armor they'd taken out the week before. "Mara. Vinea."

Under all of those, she scribbles in a new name. "Flauros," she says, before dotting her curling script off and putting the cap back on her pen. "That's the one we're going after today."

Add eyes the thin sheen of ointment that still covers her shoulder and frowns. "Are you sure you'll be okay fighting with your sprain?"

She only rolls her eyes in response and gets to her feet with a single push against her spear. "It's nothing. Besides, if that glitter we interrogated yesterday was telling the truth, Flauros is moving out tomorrow. We need to burn that stronghold down before it comes to burn _us_ down."

And there it is, the lasting logic that has kept Ara alive until now. In this Elrios, it's eat or be eaten, kill or be killed, do or be undone. Add still hasn't gotten used to it, despite the fact that he's spent longer in this timeline than in any other. "Alright, alright," he says, taking her hand and letting himself be pulled to his feet. "But you owe me a drink later."

Ara bats her eyes dangerously. "Of course, _darling_."

It's interesting how she can change so quickly between the battlefield and the bedroom and just joking alongside him as a friend. Her eyes narrow and her grip on her spear tightens and she transforms, not just physically into Eun but mentally into the warrior that she is. It's almost frightening to watch her become so focused and lethal.

But, he supposes, that's only half the fun.

The other half of the fun is seeing her fight. Regardless of advantage, Ara can turn a battlefield into a ballroom, a playground, a bloody cemetery. They throw open the doors of the stronghold, and she lights it up with a massive swirling orb of pure magical energy that crashes into the demons like a miniature sun. He falls in place next to her, and they plow a path directly into the heart of the beast's lair.

"Flauros will probably try to escape," Ara says, gritting her teeth and snapping the wrist of a glitter that tried to catch her off guard. As the demon crumples, screaming in pain, she kicks it away and lets Add finish it off with a well-placed taser. "We need to catch him before he leaves the stronghold!"

"What does he even look like?"

There's a jagged laugh from somewhere deeper in the cavern, and Ara immediately zeroes in on it and begins running in its direction. "I don't know, but he's gotta be that way!"

They slash their way through the halls and barracks, frying demons whole and setting rooms on fire. Add can feel a little less guilty about that, considering this Elrios is constantly on fire anyways. "That way!" Ara yells, grabbing his arm and pulling him through a gilded doorway.

The door closes behind them, and Add starts to feel like he's about to be sick when he looks across the walls and finds—

"Mirrors," Ara murmurs, reaching to grasp his hand firmly in hers, "why are all the walls lined in mirrors?"

Laughter echoes through the room. "That's my decor, of course." Movement, reflected thousandfold across the mirrors. "Oh, but where are my manners?" A shadowy figure, all red eyes and snowy white hair and sleek black horns, strides across the floor to them. "I am Flauros, Great Duke of the White-Ghost army. Pleased to make your acquaintance."

Ara snarls and lashes out with her spear, but she cuts through smoke and Flauros's form smirks and disappears. "Not even a greeting? My, how rude," his voice says chastitizingly from behind them. "I was hoping to make a friend."

"We aren't here to make friends!" There's a flash of light, and Ara's hair is silvery white again to match the nine tails that have sprouted from her back. "Stand down now, and I'll _consider_ making your death painless."

"Such bold words for someone who can't even locate me." Smoke puffs up in front of Add, and the feeling of a clawed finger under his chin. He bats it away as hard as he can. "Aw, look at you both, so pathetic and trying to play the hero. You've done a lot of killing lately. You're getting a little too cocky."

The apparition of Flauros appears a short distance away from them again, just out of the reach of Ara's spear. "You've played your games for long enough. My good lords have commanded me to put a stop to them. So, I had you come here, and I've had my entire stronghold filled with magical explosives. You won't make it out of this fortress alive."

But that's only because they don't know what Add can do. His console, tucked into an inner pocket of his zipped jacket, has a command that he recently programmed for spatial warping. A little primitive, but enough to get himself and Ara out of a pinch like this. Still, it's going to be annoying. "You're not even here, are you," he guesses. "You left yesterday. You planted information among the armies to make us think you were still here. We're just talking to your smoke image."

"Astute observation," Flauros says, and magic shudders through the smoke to reveal that Add guessed correctly. "You're smarter than I thought! I suppose you'll also know now that I like a good game, and I like to see my playthings run themselves into a tizzy before I blow them to pieces.

"So run, _run,_ little humans, before time runs out for you both."

There's a thump as Ara falls to her knees beside him. "Ara?" Add says, and looks down just in time to see Eun's blessing drain out of her. "Ara! Get up!"

She looks up at him with such mournful eyes, and he realizes she's crying. "Get us out of here," she pleads.

The ground beneath them begins to rumble, and a little belatedly, Add remembers that they're running out of time. "Fuck," he hisses, tearing open his jacket and ripping his console out. The command is easy enough to boot up, but smoky hands obscure his vision and he has to guess at where things are. "Hang tight, Ara."

"I just want to get out of here," she whispers.

He grabs her by the shoulders and teleports as the mirrors shatter and the world implodes on them.

* * *

They don't dance that night.

The moment they get to the inn room after checking in, Ara slams the door shut, grabs Add's collar, and drags him down for a kiss that shouldn't last nearly this long. She burns to the touch and she grabs onto him so desperately and she looks so _scared_, and he doesn't know anything except that something's wrong and Ara is clearly shaken. She breaks away for breath, and he can see in her gaze that she's on the verge of tears.

So he lets himself melt in her hands, lets her take control, and take control she does. In the twilight hours, she plays her game once more and like the faithful student that he is, he commits her body to memory. By the time she's done with him, his armor lies in a forgotten heap at the door with her spear, and the candles have smouldered away into the night, and he's so, _so_ sore but she looks a little more peaceful and less like she's about to lose everything that matters to her.

(Or maybe that's because she's come to terms that she's lost it all already?)

"I was sixteen," she says quietly, a soft contrast to the breathless screams she had uttered just minutes ago. "Maybe a bit older. I am—I was the youngest of my siblings, and no one cared for me except my elder brother, Aren."

Add has heard this story many times; he could probably recite it himself if Ara didn't have the voice to. But there's something different about this time. Is it her tone? Is it the fact that they're lying side by side, skin still feverishly warm again each other?

"I… Should have have died." Ara raises one arm from under the covers, where it had been resting on his bare thigh just earlier, and puts her hand on his chest like a burning brand. "I hope you never have to see that world, Add. They sent a demon general to possess my brother, because he was the strongest of our family. And it worked. We lost Aren in an instant, and we paid dearly for it.

"I watched him go to our parents and rip out their throats." She lazily drags her finger down his sternum, tracing the shapes of his ribs. "He said something… _run, run little children, run while big brother still cares enough to hold back_. I was careless enough to fall when my sister pushed me into a nearby room. Ran was too busy hunting my running siblings to go after me."

Her breathing shudders, and as Add entertains the image, he can't help but feel a chill down his spine as well, and not just because he hasn't heard this version of the story before. "Ara, you don't have to," he says quietly.

Ara just shushes him. "I need to say it," she insists, and her eyes are wild with a whole new light unlike during their love-making. "I need to tell you before I can't anymore, because I haven't trusted myself to tell anyone but you. Ever."

"Just take your time." Add puts his hand over hers on his chest. "Don't panic. I just don't want it to hurt you."

She takes a breath and nods. "I waited until Ran had left the house," she says, "and then I went to my eldest sister. She had the key to the shrine." She laughs darkly, and a tear runs down her face. "It took me so long because her robes were so bloodstained that I couldn't even peel them away to find the key. By the time I found it, there were demons breaking down the front door, and they'd killed everyone in the village, too.

"I ran for the shrine, but I had to leave the house first. Our homes in Isshin had courtyards. I had to fight my way—no, I had to _wade_ my way out of the courtyard to get to the shrine. I couldn't let them get away with Lord Eun. El knows what they'd do with her. But it was a dead end. I was stuck in the shrine with no way out, and Ran had me cornered." She gasps; there are now tears actively flowing down her face, leaving more dark stains on the sheets. "If it weren't for Lord Eun, I would just be another broken body, and El knows where they would have taken her."

He turns in and lets her cry into his chest, while she curls up. She's always seemed small to him because of her height; for once, she looks fragile to match. "I just wanted to survive," she sobs, reaching to him to tug on so tightly that he can barely breathe. "Now, I just want to _live_. Is that too much to ask for?"

(_It really isn't_, he wants to tell her, _you deserve to live more than anyone else._)

* * *

Once upon a timeline where things weren't so dark and fiery, Add thought Ara was naive. She put blind faith into the world around her, and always saw the bright side of things—even in a broken, destructive boy. She took the world around her and tried to make it better. Back in the other timelines, when Ara called herself the protector of divine moral, she'd been hiding a lot of herself to protect everyone else.

That Ara feels like a distant dream. Add knows better now, when he fights and sleeps at the side of a midnight queen. Nothing she put her faith into was blind; she chose her allies carefully and for calculated outcomes. She wasn't naive—she was hiding a whole lot of hurt behind a cheerful, frilly mask.

(Somehow, that's the part that hurts the most.)

They talk openly a lot more after that, though Add is still too cowardly to tell her about his time travel. Sometimes, instead of sex in the evenings, they lie down and talk about their childhoods. Things that went wrong. Things they would have wanted to see. The fact that they're both so very, very selfish, still hopeful for a future that can't exist.

Because at the end of the day, they're still just children, forced into a war that showed up at their doorstep. Add forgot what it was like to be a child because he never really got to be one in the first place, and Ara hasn't known peace since she picked up her spear and swore to avenge her family. It's two parts anger and three parts spite, but Ara fights because she wants to see the end of this, so that she can say with pride that she's a survivor. To live it out and see peace. To properly grow up and live a life without fighting.

The demon war waits for no one, though. After Flauros escapes, the demons flood back in, and the surviving free peoples of Elrios begin to migrate towards Elder for safety. Not many fighters are left; Add finds himself hopping all across Elrios to destroy demon bases before they can destroy him. The war moves on without them, and that's when it all goes downhill.

The fight for survival gets worse and worse as they move uphill, even though both of them have gained new skills and methods that are beyond their understanding. Add slings volleys and volleys of electricity and dances on the veil of existence in and out of time, while Ara summons waves of the spirits of the dead to strike at their demon foes. It doesn't work.

They're wading through a bloody sky when Ara screams, and Add turns just in time to see her fall, a serpentine demon's stinger plunged deep into her back wound. He grits his teeth and grabs the demon and wrings its neck, but the demons smell _fear_ and _blood_ and zero in on him. The waves of demons wash over him endlessly, and in the end it's a blow to the head that knocks him down.

When he comes to, a few minutes later, it's to the sound of a horn being blown. The demon armies chant as they approach, and Add can barely lift his head off the ground to see what's happening before the Waldo plants its foot on his chest with a _crunch_.

He screams out in pain, and somewhere in the back of his mind he registers the harmony of his voice and Ara's. It feels like the ice splinters are digging into his skin again, except this time they're penetrating deeper and tearing his organs apart as well. The Waldo seems to delight in his anguish and twists its foot, and Add feels his already broken ribcage turn to dust with the impact.

Another horn sounds, and the weight lets up. He fights back another scream as the pain redoubles. The world goes black for a moment, and this time, when he comes to, he knows he's going to die.

Next to him, her black dress stained with her own blood and torn by her own bone fragments, Ara lies gasping for breath. "So this is it," she says, laughing a little even though the pain must be _excruciating_. "God. We really fucked up this time, didn't we?"

"We really did," Add mumbles. Around him, his dynamos whirr sadly like they feel his anguish.

There's a sniffle, and he uses all of his remaining strength to turn his head slightly to face Ara. "It's alright," he says, even though it's absolutely _not_ alright, he's failed _again_ and let her die _again_, "you don't have to hold it back."

"I just," Ara says, "wanted to _do_ more, you know? There are so many things I didn't get to do because war got in the way, and before I knew it fighting became my life. I wish I could have done everything over." She tries to smile, even though her chest heaves with the crushing mass of a million pounds. "But if there's anything I wouldn't change, it would be you. Thank you, Add. You really made me happy."

They lay in silence after that, as the battlefield rumbles to a halt and their shuddering breaths sync. Add tries his hardest to keep his eyes open, to watch the blood pour down from the crimson sky and endure the drops that sizzle on his skin.

Ara says something. It's important, and it's only three words, but then she doesn't say anything else afterwards, and her hand goes slack, and Add finally, _finally_ understands why she's been doing this over all these timelines, closes his eyes and dares to let himself go after her, go with her.

Except fate is cruel, and when the pain fades and he thinks he's finally, _finally_ free from the cycle, he wakes up to spring and a beautiful blue sky.

(After all, the show must go on.)

* * *

**A/N: damn marg, back at it again with the late updates**

**happy late canada day everyone, and i guess happy late independence day to my american friends too. i've been exceptionally busy this week, doing a food safety certification course (long story) and i just wasn't happy with this chapter until like literally just now.**

**but writing this chapter was absolutely something i needed to get out of my system, thinly veiled smut scenes and all. this was also one of the earliest chapters planned out for this fic, and i knew something short wasn't going to cut it, hence the... word count gone absolute nuts.**

**some notes:**

**\- this chapter singlehandedly bumped the rating up to M and i absolutely guarantee it will stay there**

**\- i have. a massive playlist for this chapter, but the key pieces are 1) the violin solo from Scheherazade 2) _While the Trees Sleep_ by David Nevue and 3) _Take Me to Church_ by Hozier**

**\- in planning, the focal scene of this entire chapter was supposed to be the pillowtalk scene, and dancing wasn't such a focus, but then i got way too into the violin solo and here we are**

**\- the skill that Add was developing is, in fact, Moonlight Rhapsody! i adapted it from the Moonlight Lullaby, a song of my own composition. hmu if you want a recording of that**

**\- Flauros is a demon from the Ars Goetia and is also known by Haures. Mara is a Buddhist demon, and Vinea and Alastor are both Christian demons.**

**once again, sorry for the late chapter, and i hope the next one will be on time!**

**~Marg **


	7. 6: Sixteen

Add props himself up on his elbows in the grass, staring in disbelief at his own feet. Nothing on him is bloodied, nothing stained. He lifts one arm slowly in shock and runs his hand under his ribs. No signs of fractures, no tears, no coagulating blood that coats his fingers when he raises his hand to his eyes, utterly dumbfounded. Just dust and grass that sticks to his back and prickles his neck.

He was dead. He was _supposed to_ die there in that wasteland, breath crushed out from beneath him, at Ara's side. It was supposed to end there. His purgatory was supposed to end the moment he closed his eyes at her side, and it didn't, and everything is wrong.

And that's not even the worst of it. As he shakily gets to his feet, dynamos strewn in a mess around him, he looks up into the bluest sky he has ever seen. The sun's shining. Grass (_actual grass!_) carpets the ground he stands on. Not a single storm cloud lines the sky, and Add feels that something is terribly, horribly wrong because of it.

He's alone in this forest clearing, standing in the grass, and doesn't know where he is.

There must be a way out, of course, so he gets around to rebooting all of his dynamos and looking for directions. The time sickness didn't repair his console—it lies crushed to fragments and wires in his inner pocket, and he has to go through the tedious process of rebooting each dynamo individually. Thankfully, they survived the impact, and soon he's got them cruising in the sky, looking for signs of civilization.

The forest burbles and crackles with life, a magic that Add lacks any understanding of. He stops to listen, though, and tries to follow the sounds. He doesn't know it, but the instincts that his ancestors followed kick in as he seeks out a stream that may or may not exist.

He stops by the stream, watching the water ebb and flow over the rocks. This idyllic scene is so different from what he's used to. Gone are the days of crimson skies and blood-stained earth; far behind him are the war cries and battle commands in the distance. This Elrios does not have war flowing in its sullied veins, but rather a peace that thumps along in its lasting heartbeat.

It's by this stream that Add finds her. His landing coordinates were locked on her; it was only natural that he'd find her again. She's strolling on the other side of the stream, a handful of wildberries in hand as she pops them in her mouth one at a time. Her hair flows freely down her back, with only her braids secured in place with her hairpin. She's smiling.

It doesn't matter that this Ara wears orange and white instead of black and gold. It doesn't matter that she keeps no spear in hand. It doesn't matter if she doesn't recognize him. This is Ara, and Add feels himself relax again in her presence.

He brings himself to meet her eyes, and wonders what he must look like to her. A stranger, of course; dragged through the mud, covered in grass, armor bloodied, sclera the colour of night. All he can think is that she's here, and he's safe again.

One foot in the water, and then the other. The reeds on the banks bend as he slips past by, the sound of leaves crunching lost in the current. He doesn't care that his pants are going to get soaked, or that he's slowly sinking into the mud with each step. He wades into the stream, towards those beautiful golden eyes that beckon him home unknowingly.

Add reaches the opposite bank and quietly puts his arms around Ara in a hug. It feels right, even though he knows it's absolutely wrong to be hugging a complete stranger like this.

"Do I… know you?" Ara asks, although she doesn't struggle from his grasp.

"No. You shouldn't, anyhow." He sighs. "I'm just glad to see you."

(It doesn't help that his heart skips a beat when she puts her hands on his shoulders and holds him tighter, like he actually means something.)

* * *

This is the story of a kinder Elrios, with blue skies and pastoral farmland. The air is clean, the mountains are topped with light snowfall, and newborn phorus skitter around in the forest without fear of being eaten. The day is filled with sunshine; the night is filled with fireflies that scatter into stardust at the slightest wave of the hand.

Ara seems amused that Add is so transfixed with this Elrios. "I know," she says, guiding him out of the forest with a basket of herbs and berries hanging at her elbow, "I felt like this when I first moved south, too."

They walk along the edge of the stream as she continues to fill her basket with plants and even a few mushrooms. She offers some of the berries to Add, and he's surprised to find how sweet and tart they are. Sometimes they stop to splash their faces and quench their thirst with water cupped in their hands from the stream.

In hindsight, Add should have expected to meet the others soon, too. Maybe it's because he's spent so long away from them (his isolationist self-purgatory immediately followed by the horrors of the last timeline have done him no favours) but he's almost surprised when Ara mentions bringing him to meet her friends and allies. The thin coat of fear that lines his stomach when he sees the warm blaze of the campfire surprises him.

"Everyone, I found someone in the woods!" Ara calls, grabbing his hand and pulling him forward before he can disappear into the shadows. "His name's Add. Come say hi!"

"Jeez, Ara, it's nearly nine," Elsword scolds, but he gets to his feet and reaches a hand to Add in good nature. "Add, you said? I'm Elsword. Nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you too," Add says weakly.

The others come around to introduce themselves as well. This El Search Party seems to be a blend of the ones he's met from timelines past, with different abilities and appearances. They seem extremely content with their lives; Raven's got a ukelele in his hand and is strumming with the tips of his mechanical fingers, while Elesis sings old hymns and Lu naps on Eve's shoulder.

In a word: home.

Sparks from the fire crackle into the otherwise still night air. The others turn in for the night, one by one, saying their goodnights and their sleep-tights. A few of them remain by the fire—Add, the original insomniac; Ara, snacking on berries; Elsword and Elesis, playing some sort of children's game with sticks in the dirt; and Rose, watching Elesis with a degree of fondness that can only be described as love.

"Dynamos, you called them?" Elsword grins as he pokes the dynamo floating closest to him. It wobbles in the air, but doesn't fall. "That's really cool! I've never met anyone who can fight with electricity."

"Eve fights with electricity," Elesis points out, making a face at her brother.

"Eh, but she's not made of flesh and bone, and she's not scared of getting shocked." This timeline's Elsword is easygoing, with what feels like a permanent smile and a swing in his step that doesn't fade with exhaustion. Add wishes he could have half of this guy's energy. "Seriously, dude, that's sick. I can't wait to see you in a fight."

Add freezes. "Do you guys," he says, and then tries again. "Do you guys fight often?"

The others don't seem to go any more tense at this question; in fact, they almost _relax_, like it's some sort of joke between them, the whole fighting thing. "Nah, we spar sometimes, but for the most part we don't have to do a lot of fighting," Elesis tells him. She's just as nonchalant as her brother, playfully poking his side of the line in the dirt with her stick. "There were a few bigger threats that we had to take care of—"

"Banthus," Elsword supplies. "The whole issue with King Nasod taking Ruben's El. The demon invasion of Feita." If he notices Add flinch at the words _demon invasion_, he doesn't comment on it. "But that was all months ago. These days, we're just cleaning up the countryside after all the battles. A lot of the smaller demon strongholds never got the message to surrender."

"That's good," Add says quietly. Upon the strange looks he's getting from the others, he elaborates: "Although I'm from Velder, I've been travelling for a long time, and the last place I stayed was constantly being attacked by demons. My lo—" he looks at Ara for a second, and thinks again. "My travelling companion and close friend was killed shortly before I made it here."

Elsword looks shocked. Rose stays stoic, but her wide eyes betray her horror. Ara has her hands over her mouth, eyes sparkling with tears. "And so you returned here to escape a cruel land," Elesis summarizes. "Dang, son."

"Is that why you were covered in mud?" Ara whispers, almost too soft to be heard. "Oh, you poor thing."

And that's too much, so he shakes his head and smiles. "It's alright. I'm home now, so it'll be alright. I'll wash off the mud soon, I promise." He can't quite bear to look her in the eye, so he drops his gaze onto his mud-stained knees. "I'll avenge my _friend._ By living the life she wanted to."

He manages to glance up, and in that moment he meets her gaze. Despite the tears, she looks so resolute, so unshakeable, so much stronger than him. "I'll live the life she wanted me to."

* * *

Within a month of Add joining the El Search Party, they're able to force the demon forces to retreat towards the badlands of Lanox. Elsword chalks it up to Add's superior technology, which he quickly claims is a product of the nation he'd been travelling in. Eve eyes his dynamos once and never again, and he's just glad that he changed the design long ago to exclude Nasod elements.

If the last timeline was hell on earth, then this is paradise. Add still stops occasionally just to stare at children playing in meadows, or the way a drop of rain rolls off a blade of grass, or that puff of harmless smoke from the chimney of a bakery in town. The others watch in amusement as he goes out of his way to stare at a fat bumblebee; he just watches the bumblebee, transfixed by the fur that lines its tiny form.

If this is paradise, then Add doesn't want to leave.

The way the others behave implies that this is the busiest they've been in years, that the few skirmishes they get into are some sort of impending doom of the future. Add thinks about the daily battles from the last timeline, the mornings when he'd wake up not to _(her)_ hands on his bare skin but explosions knocking down their door, and thanks every god he knows by name that he won't have to fear the sound of splintering wood in the morning ever again.

Nonetheless, there is time to stop and enjoy life, to _cherish_ life. The war against the demons still rolls by every day, putting that constant worry of battle in sight, but it's not _war_ as Add knows it. Yes, there's the fighting, the skirmishes, the injuries, but there's also time to rest, to live, to love.

"Don't rush yourself," Ara laughs from her perch on a higher platform as he grabs onto yet another ledge and pulls himself forward. "We're almost at the summit. You'll only hurt yourself if you reach wrong and fall."

"Remind me why I let you drag me up this mountain," Add grumbles. There's sand in his eyes, and the altitude is making it a little harder to breathe, but if it makes her happy, if it makes her _smile_, he's willing to come up here any day.

"Because you said you wanted to see the sunset," she tells him, offering him her hand as he approaches her platform. He takes it gratefully, and allows himself to be hauled up to stand beside her. "And I don't know of any better place to see the sunset on this side of Elrios than here."

He stands up straight, and watches as the sunset lights up his world in pink and gold, glittering across a rapidly darkening sky. The horizon is lined with clouds so soft and wispy that he wishes he could reach out and catch them.

Then he looks over at Ara, and his breath catches in his chest. The light turns her dark hair to golden flame, illuminating her in all the colours of the sunset and catching the rosy glow in her cheeks. She says something, laughs out loud, and all he knows to do is to smile at her and bask in the comfort of her warmth.

Yes, there's the fighting, the skirmishes, the injuries, but there's also time to rest, to live, to _love._

* * *

_I love her,_ Add realizes, as Ara yells out his name and knocks an arrow out of the sky, shattering it into a million splinters before it can seek out his heart.

_I love her,_ he tells himself, as she casually slips an extra bandage into his hand after watching him struggle with a scrape from some close call with an incubus's knife.

_I love her,_ he muses as she flies through battles and skirmishes like she's dancing on air, and then proceeds to trip her way across flat ground to sit on the log beside him.

Then the weight of a million lives hits him, and the sun goes down as the campfire burns low and pretends not to laugh at his suffering. Add, a lonely time traveler with a chronic supernatural illness; Ara, an angel sent to him by a god who only laughs at his ingratitude. In what timeline would someone as wonderful as her return the feelings of someone as broken as him?

"I love her," he whispers, mostly to himself, as Ara nods off on his shoulder, just as he saw Rose nod off on Elesis's shoulder so many months ago. She looks so peaceful, even with her dark hair sticking in every direction and her cheek all pushed up against his armor. In the warm light of the fire, Add sees a home in her. "Oh. I love her."

_Too little, too late,_ something inside says mockingly. _This isn't the answer._

And to that, he honestly has no response.

* * *

If it were just Add and Ara, partners in crime, travelling across Elrios, maybe this wouldn't be so painful. Maybe Eun would encourage them to talk, to fight together. Maybe they'd grow close, closer, in a whirlwind of midnight dances. Maybe Add would muster up the courage to confess, punctuated with a soft kiss across her knuckles or the gentlest brush of his hand across her face. Maybe she'd reciprocate. Maybe they'd be happy.

Instead, Add has to watch in abject horror as his friends get themselves together, one by one. Elesis and Rose finally stop beating around the bush and laugh their pining away into a starry night. Aisha finally gets the guts to tell her feelings to Elsword's face, and soon they've got their legs tangled together as they nap under a tree. Even Chung and Eve, shy as they can be, are discussing their futures as sovereigns of separate but united nations together.

"You love her," Rena notes with amusement as Add stares over the wedding festivities, gaze focused on Ara laughing and dancing in the middle of the venue. There are stars in her hair and stars in her eyes and stars upon her lips as she laughs out with all the sounds of joy to exist. "You know, we've been making bets as to when you'll finally confess to her."

"I thought you said you were above betting," he mutters. "What happened to the Rena who said that moms don't gamble?"

"She just got married," Rena jokes, looping her arm tighter around Raven's. "Go dance with her. You look like such a sad little puppy watching her out there."

It seems strange to see Raven smile, but he does, and somehow it seems fitting with the golden bands on his and Rena's fingers. "You should," he says. "Happiness doesn't always come directly. Sometimes you have to reach just a little out of your way to find it."

As the newlyweds start crooning at each other like preening birds, Add makes the split-second decision to escape before they can start getting gross. He drains the ale from his glass and sets it on a nearby table before running onto the dance floor, slipping past the slow dancers and reaching the table where Ara has retreated to alone, still smiling.

"You don't seem like the type to dance," she comments, tilting her head curiously with wineglass in hand. "Looking for a way out of the chaos?"

"Surprisingly, no." He pauses, unsure of how much he wants to tell her, how much he wants her to know. "I learned to slow dance during my travels. It's… been a while, to be honest."

Ara laughs, pure and clear as the bubbling brook where he found her. "You and I both, then. As you might imagine, I have two left feet on the dancefloor."

"Hey, practice makes perfect." It's now or never; he holds out a hand to her, hoping that she sees his attempt at a kind smile before the nervous shake in his arm. "Would you practice with me?"

The perfect _o_ of surprise that her lips form is just as nerve-wracking. "I… oh, wow," she says, and this time Add is close enough to see the gentle dimples that compliment the rosy glow of her cheeks. "I'd be honoured."

They don't bother with formalities of dancing, because this is just for practice, after all. Ara's hand feels like a home in itself on Add's shoulder, like a warmth he can only crave in memory. He puts a gentlemanly hand on her waist, and she grins childishly and slides it down to rest on her hip.

Maybe this is heaven after all. Maybe Add really did die on that fiery battlefield, his chest crushed under the cruel step of an entire army. Maybe this is his Valhalla, his Paradise, his Nirvana: the lights dimmed to make way for a million stars; Ara in a sunset-dipped dress, safe and sound in his arms as a kind night blankets them in its warmth. The band plays on, and in between the hums of the violin Add thinks he can pick out the words in Elrian and in Elvish.

_May it be an evening star, shines down upon you_

_May it be when darkness falls, your heart will be true_

_You walk a lonely road_

_Oh, how far you are from home_

_Mornië utúlië, believe and you will find your way_

_Mornië alantië, a promise lives within you now._

Then Ara shifts her hands, and rests her head on his chest, and that's it, Add can't be in heaven because no heaven would send him an angel like this. His heart is pounding out of his chest, and he's certain she can hear it, but she just closes her eyes and smiles like this is where she belongs.

"Ara," he whispers, and the way she looks up at him makes him _melt_ down to his very bones. "Ara?"

"I'm listening," she says softly, so gently that it physically pains him to say what he needs to say.

"You're stepping on my feet."

She looks a little startled, but she takes it in good stride, laughing gently as she pulls away just enough to deliberately step away. "Practice makes perfect," she echoes, pressing her face back to his heart, "so we'd best practice some more, don't you think?"

"Yeah," he says, not daring to breathe, "practice makes perfect."

* * *

"I love you," Add says.

It's a beautiful day, not unlike the one where Ara found him, and even though he always says that she did there's an unspoken _you helped me find myself_ lining it. Their friends tease and prod whenever it's sunny out like this and they pack for a happy little picnic, but it's a ritual that neither Add nor Ara can shake off, a sacred procession as they hold the basket between them and head into the fields.

There's a lot of well-kept gardens and parks in Velder, but all of them are far into the city, where the snooty upper-class live with their walls lined in tapestries and sorrow. The fields once filled with demon patrols are now safe for the children to play with, and it's here that Ara spreads her tartan picnic blanket in the thickest of the wild grasses, and it's here that Add lays his head in her lap and tells her that he loves her.

The first few moments after he says it, Add forgets how to breathe. The wind picks up, and Ara's black hair billows out around her like an ebon kite. There is a twinkle in her smile that feels like home, a spark in her eyes that speaks a million words before she even opens her mouth.

"I love you too," Ara says.

The world freezes.

"Oh! Don't cry, sweetheart," she says, and brushes away a tear Add didn't realize he'd shed. "I love you, and I mean it."

"I mean as more than a friend," he tries, and the pressure builds way too much in his chest, enough to burst at a moment's notice. "I mean as much, _much_ more than friends."

Because _why_ would someone as perfect as Ara love someone as broken as him; _how_ could she, an angel in every sense of the word, fall for a wisp of a human like him; in what life would she willingly tell him that she loves him without being on her deathbed herself?

(Because Ara is just too perfect, and Add is just not.)

So when she smiles and presses her hand to his cheek, he feels like his heart has stopped altogether. "I know," she says, "and I do, too. I love you, Add, with all that I am."

"Please," he croaks, "say it again."

She hums, and leans down, and presses fleeting kisses to his forehead, to his nose, to his eyelids. "I love you," she murmurs, and with every word, Add gives another fragment of himself to her. "I love you. I love you."

When her lips touch his, he forgets all else. The world could be on fire, and all Add would know is the feeling of Ara's love. She holds him like he's dying in her grasp, like he's held her so many times now, like he actually means something to her and isn't just a broken burden.

"Ara," he says faintly when she lifts her head and breaks away, "I think I'm dying."

"That's okay," she giggles, "but you gotta promise to _live_ for me, okay?"

She lifts her legs just a little, and he obliges with the motion, lifting his head so that she can slip out from beneath and lay down next to him. There's grass in her hair, and a tear at the corner of her eye, but by god if she isn't the most beautiful, radiant person Add has ever seen. "We'll both live, together."

_(He loves her—)_

"I promise," he says, whispers out his oath reverently as he leans in to kiss her again, "I promise."

* * *

It turns out _all_ of their friends had been making bets as to when they'd get together, and so when they return from that picnic hand in hand, Add very clearly sees money being passed into Rena's waiting hands. There's congratulations all around, and at least one _finally_ muttered under one's breath, but it's all good; Add has been pining for far too long, and if their friends' anecdotes are anything to go by, so has Ara.

Add finally learns what _la vie en rose_ means when he wakes up with his head in her lap as she's reading, and he opens his eyes and sees her smiling as she plays with his hair. With the tide of her breath, he learns to breathe; with the ebb of her consciousness, he learns to dream. He cherishes each day like there's no tomorrow, loves Ara like she'll be gone.

So it's no surprise when Ara follows through on her word and asks him to live with her, together, after the war. He accepts wholeheartedly, because what else can he do? It's not like he has anywhere else to live but at her side, close to her heart. They pick out a house on the outskirts of Elder before the war comes to a shuddering stop, and by the time they hold their housewarming party, it's already time to think of the post-war triumph parades.

Add quite likes the new house. The day they move in, Ara sets all of her cotton clothes into her new dresser and hangs up all of their armor in the closet, and Add relishes in that one moment when he sneaks up on her and surprises her by kissing the back of her neck. He knows their friends are still in the other rooms, bringing in kitchen supplies and furniture and books, but the sunlit bedroom is just his and Ara's, for that moment and for their eternity.

"You look lovely," he tells her sincerely. "I haven't gotten a chance to tell you that lately."

Ara smiles as she turns to cradle his face. "You told me that just this morning," she says teasingly, "when we woke up, and again over breakfast."

"It's been too long," he says, even though he knows fully well that she's right. "I have to say it or else my heart will explode."

"Well, that wouldn't be good, would it?"

They hold each other a lot more these days. After initially dancing around each other in the days immediately following their confessions, Add has been less afraid to show his affection physically, just as Ara does. Sure, he's still awkward as all hell in public, but when she threads her fingers through his, he feels like he could fly to the moon and pluck a star out of the sky for her.

So maybe Add isn't dreaming when he gathers Ara into his arms, and buries his face in her hair. Maybe he isn't imagining things when she holds him close, when he's sure she can hear his heart beat out of his chest.

"Leave some room for Elria, you two!"

Ara yelps, and Add lets go of her as they both fly backwards. Elesis is grinning in the doorway, holding a basket of clothes that they must have forgotten to bring in earlier. "Jeez, we're literally in your house, you guys are _anything_ but alone," she chides. "Wait until we've all left, at least!"

"Is this revenge for us being insufferable about you and Rose?" Add groans.

"Eh, maybe."

Late into the night, after everyone else has left, Add finishes drying off the last of the dishes and sticks it on the shelf. "Anything else?" he calls.

In the candlelight, Ara looks rosy and warm, her hair plaited and glinting gold upon jet. "I think that's the last of it," she says, wrenching her dishcloth out over the basin. "On the upside, we won't have to cook for at least three days, with all the food they left us."

"I'm not looking forwards to eating Chung's cooking for the next few days."

It's then that the gravity of it all hits him, like someone hit him in the face with a sack of bricks. This is their house, that he and Ara bought together with their funds from the war. He's standing in their kitchen right now, putting away the dishes that they picked out together last week at the bazaar. They have a whole house of their own with a little garden in the back that Ara intends to populate with zucchinis and tomatoes.

And Ara, who he once thought to be a faraway star, Ara is here with him. She's humming something as she works, wiping away the ashes on the stove. There's a lilt in her voice and a dance in her step as she turns around, apron and skirt turning a second later, to put away a stray wineglass.

It's then that the fact that _Ara loves him_ really hits, and that's when the tears begin to flow.

"Gosh, where'd I put the rest of the small dishes?" When Ara turns around, it pains him to see the worry that fills her face. "Love, what's wrong? Please don't cry."

"Nothing's wrong, I'm just…" He freezes as her hands brush across his cheeks, and he stops to stare at her in sheer reverence. Ara is his Helen, his Laura, his Beatrice Portinari at the end of Purgatory. This little house in the woods outside Elder City has become his Paradise as she holds him so close, as if nothing will ever come between them and their love. "It's only just hit me that we're living together now."

Ara smiles and kisses him so gently that he swears he can see the angel wings sprout from her back. "I know, Add. We've been travelling so long with the El Search Party that settling down feels strange." She brushes away an errant tear, thumbs away a strand of hair that has wandered into his eyes. "But it's okay. My home is where _you_ are, Add. And if that means here in this house, then we'll make a home of it together."

"That's a good thought," he says quietly, face pressed into her palm. "My mother used to say that home is where the heart is, and my heart is yours, now and always." He turns ever so lightly and presses a kiss to the soft skin of her hand. "We should _make_ this our home."

There's no band playing, and no means for them to play music, but Add takes up Ara's hand, and she puts her other one on his shoulder, and they sway together in a wind that blows only for them.

* * *

It dawns on Add that he should probably consider proposing when Ara catches the bouquet at Elsword and Aisha's wedding, and immediately pushes the flowers at him with a bright, beautiful smile. "I caught it," she laughs, eyes crinkling at the corners. "Look at the flowers, Add!"

He does look at the flowers, and while the mix of purple roses, pear blossoms and scarlet camellias is stunning, it was definitely made for the bride, and he _knows_ Ara will be holding something even more brilliant when she walks down the aisle.

His first thought is that he should make the ring himself, because his workshed in the backyard of their little house is quiet and lonely and has a whole lot of tools. A few failed attempts later, he realizes he has little to no experience whatsoever with turning a sketch into reality without breaking out the paints and 3D printer.

So Add swallows his pride, and goes to Raven for help, because Raven has been married for two years and has had two opportunities to present a ring in a proposal. Raven stares at him from the doorway, sighs, and lets him in with all the air of someone who has dealt with this exact question too many times.

"I bought a ring for Rena," Raven says, passing a mug of steaming tea to Add, "so I can't say the same about you trying to make one." He has to stop here and put the kettle down as he pinches his nosebridge, as if it'll make the headache of dealing with the rowdy kids of the El Search Party any better. "Just don't do anything that'll hurt her in the long run, and you'll do fine."

Add thinks of Ara's whispers to him, of how Rena has cried because she knows Raven is just a drop in her life's ocean, and decides not to comment. "You picked a ring that you thought she'd like?" he asks instead, snuggling the mug between his hands. "Something personal?"

Raven shrugs. "Rena's a traditional kind of person. You saw how many elven customs there were in our wedding."

In the end, he locks himself in his workshop while Ara's out helping Rose and Elesis move into their new house, and goes back to the drawing board. He has a 3D printer borrowed from Eve, and a bunch of engraving tools lent by Rose, and a scribbled guide from Luichel from Elder. None of these help him in the slightest when he doesn't have any idea what to make.

"Something that suits her," he mumbles, prodding a loose topaz stone with his grease pencil. The gem rolls lazily across the tabletop, eventually dipping into a rift in the wood and falling into the surface. "Or something that she'd like? Or something that represents _us_?"

There's too much to think about, and he just wants to curl up into a ball and have the _perfect_ ring and present it to Ara and be hers forever.

But that's not what he can do, and that's not what she deserves.

"Something she deserves," he says out loud, the thought suddenly hitting him. "Something as perfect as she is."

The final ring reflects him just as much as it reflects her: a simple golden band, inlaid with mithril to strengthen the metal and prevent it from warping. Two little gems of lavender amethyst and marmalade citrine adorn the top, sparkling in the sun but set in tightly so that even the harshest battles cannot knock them out. They fit together the way Ara's hands fit into Add's, the way their bodies become flush with one another in the coldest nights, the way they've given this cold world light with their love.

Now all that's left is to actually propose, and isn't that the hardest part? He can make it grand; he can make it small. All he's certain of is that he _has_ to do it, for himself if not for her.

So he does. He puts the ring in his pocket, and helps Ara pack a nice picnic basket, and they go venturing into the forest from whence he came. They don't talk much about the places Add went before he came to this Elrios, but the forest always represents a start for them, a beginning. A means to put some sense of purpose in his tiny existence in the grand fabric of time.

"Where are we going?" Ara asks, as they walk along the stream. Add's got the basket in one hand and her hand in the other, gripping onto her tightly as she walks along the rocks with her shoes dangling from her fingers. "I heard there's a lake really deep into this forest."

"Mmm. Maybe we can go there later." There's the bush with the wildberries that she'd picked for him; there's the rock formation by the stream that had held him in the current as he'd held her to survive. "Right now I have something for you."

He takes one experimental step into the river, and finds it cold but not uncomfortably so, just enough to ground him in the reality of the situation. "I remember," he murmurs, wrapping his arms around her middle once more, and finding her heartbeat effortlessly, "wading across this river when I saw you. I remember being tired, of being _alone,_ and you were the first sign of humanity I had seen in ages. _You found me._"

"This is," Ara says, and her lip wobbles when she smiles, "this is where we met."

"It is."

His hand slips into his pocket, and he runs a calloused finger over the edge of the ring one more time, to steady himself. "You found me," he repeats, and holds the ring between them. "Please, let me find you too." He gulps, the last of his worries fading. "Ara Haan, will you marry me?"

Ara nods breathlessly, and allows him to slip the ring onto her finger. "Yes, yes, forever and always," she whispers, gripping his face so tenderly before she kisses him. "I'll marry you, a million times over, from this life and on into the next."

Then the stream gives way, and Add's foot slips just a little too much, and they go shrieking into the river. It's cold and the silt rises up to squish against their palms, and then Ara is breaking out of the water laughing as her dress billows through the current all around. Mud drips off her hand, revealing the meticulously-made ring that sparkles as she caresses his face oh-so tenderly, and he leans into her touch.

"I love you," she whispers.

"And I love you," he replies, and means it.

* * *

They hold the wedding in May, in the field where they swore their love to each other. It's small, since they're not exactly lords of Velder, and it's large, since they're not exactly normal people. It's a wedding befitting a pair of wartime heroes, no matter how much Add might refuse the title. They commission a wedding portrait to hang in their living room, and they prepare their vows, and they pick out music for their first dance.

Ara wants a wedding in the traditional style of her people, and who is Add to deny her any happiness, so he goes with it, and they integrate little things from the Elrian tradition: an exchanging of rings, a reception party, a cake. There's one white dress in the closet for the party, and a red gown and veil delicately wrapped and set on a shelf for the ceremony. Instead of vows proper, they say prayers for each other, blessings cleverly disguised as promises.

The minutes of waiting as Ara approaches the stone altar feel like an eternity, but when Add finally lifts the scarlet veil over Ara's face, and sees her beaming at him underneath with so much tender love in her smile, he knows it's all been worth it.

Add kisses Ara for the first time as her husband, and it is all he could ever ask for.

The night fills with laughter, and soon they've changed out of the red ceremonial robes into matching ensembles in white. Eun's magic fills the sky with a brilliant sunshower for all of a moment before it blossoms into stellar rainbows. With azaleas braided through her hair and a flounce in her skirt that wavers in the wind, Ara looks so radiant as she grabs Add's hands, knocking their new wedding bands together. "Come on, Add, it's time for our first dance!"

She was the one to suggest the song for their first dance, and now she's the one who leads him through the familiar steps. He holds her close enough that he can feel the pulse in her palm and the warmth of her skin through the silk of her dress, and he buries his face in her hair and tries not to sneeze from the azaleas.

"I love you," he murmurs, as the sun dapples them in sweet summer gold, and the wind picks up to stream azalea petals into the air. "I'll love you forever."

"And I, you, my love," she replies, and laughs so prettily when he does sneeze.

It's not as stunning as the band that played for Raven and Rena, but Add thinks that he could live forever in Ara's arms as the piano sings and the vocalists turn the afternoon to loving tender flame. He opens his eyes to her smile, and he's never been so enveloped in love.

_And your eyes,_

_They tell me how much you care, oh_

_You will always be_

_My endless love._

* * *

They honeymoon in a little seaside town north of Hamel, and it's a delightful departure from walking everywhere to be in the little gondolas travelling the canals. The locals speak a strong dialect of common Elrian that rings in Add's ears like church bells, but Ara seems to love it and picks up slang over the days that they're there.

There's a flutter in Ara's skirt as they walk down the dock hand in hand, twin wedding bands warm from each other's touch. At the edge of the dock, their rented gondola bobs gently in the water, restless upon the waves. Add holds it steady as Ara boards, and off they go into the afternoon.

"Can we have paella for dinner?" Ara asks, and even if Add didn't like paella just as much as she does he wouldn't be able to refuse her for the world. "I know we had it yesterday too, but it's _so good_ and we don't have the spices or the rice to make it back home."

"We can have whatever you want," Add tells her. "This is our time to relax. It's back to work as soon as we go home."

They both know fully well that it's not really _work_ like it was during the war. Ara teaches a martial arts class in the city, and Add works in infrastructure now, but it's not running all across Elrios driving the demons out. They'll just return to the lively monotony of their lives, armed with brand-new wedding bands and ever-renewed twin smiles.

Someone is playing the accordion on the shorebank, a lively waltz that Ara's eyes light up at. It turns out to be a young boy sitting on a dock, a cap on his head in dark blue and gold to match the oversized accordion in his hands. He offers them a wink and a smile as they float past by, pausing his playing for a moment to tip his hat politely.

They get off by the cafe where they'd had paella the day before, and they're ushered in quickly with warm smiles. The locals seem to love Ara and her clumsy grace, and the children laugh whenever Add seemingly whispers life into pieces of scrap metal with just his bare hands. If the cafe wasn't warm to begin with, it certainly is now, as people begin to stream in to share in the laughter and the music.

It turns into a celebration of people, of colours, of merriment. Baskets of flaky bread and bowls of rich soup are passed around as tables are pieced together, and it only takes a moment of Ara's wide, dewy eyes for Add to cave in and climb onto the tables with her. The old couple who own the cafe join them, and Ara laughs and laughs as her skirts swirl up in a tidal wave.

The afternoon fades into a lovely evening, and the evening sun drowns into a sunset sky and leaves a starry tapestry behind. Add fastens off the gondola on the dock and helps Ara out after him. "Thank you, love," she murmurs, stepping delicately onto the dock. The faded wooden planks seem to relax under her weight. "Let's head inside."

They curl up together on the couch in front of the fireplace, fit together like puzzle pieces. Ara dances her fingers up the lapels of Add's jacket as he absently pats down the creases on her skirt in a mindless rhythm.

It feels _right._ It feels like he belongs here, with her head against his shoulder as she dozes off. He has no doubt that he'll be carrying her to bed sometime soon, and he's not even remotely mad about it. This is what he's wanted: the idyllic, happy life that his mother never had, that neither of his parents ever had. For once, he's happy.

_I'm happy,_ he thinks, as his eyes close slowly and he rests his cheek against Ara's head, _I'm really happy._

* * *

"Do you think," Ara asks, "we could be parents?"

Add blinks at the wad of blanket and child in her arms. It's been two days since Rena and Raven had their firstborn, and now Add and Ara are watching over little Seris while her parents get some sleep. It seems like the newborn is napping too for a while; her little pink nose and lips poke out of the blankets, her chest rising and falling just the tiniest bit to indicate that she's still breathing. "I haven't entertained the thought."

Ara hums softly. "Do you _want_ kids?"

There's the question, the eternal one that will haunt Add for the rest of his unnatural life: _do you want to hold the responsibility of raising one or more small humans and making them not messed up as you are? Do you want to bear the burden of sleepless nights and changing diapers and cleaning up toys and birthday parties? Do you want to take care of a human whose life is quite literally bound to yours?_

Because Add has never had a good father figure in his life, and as such he doesn't know if he can _be_ a father. There's still anger in his veins over his biological father, and as he gets older that particular fire just seems to burn brighter. He remembers nights of hearing his mother cry, of pretending to sleep so he wouldn't be punished, of being shaped into a literal human weapon. Maybe he didn't lose his humanity when he unlocked the secrets of time—maybe there was something in him that wasn't quite human all along, something that was imbedded in him from childhood—

"Add!"

He blinks. Ara has scooted closer to him, and with Seris resting in her lap, she's able to shake his shoulder to break him out of the spiral. "I'm sorry if that wasn't a good question," she says quietly. They've spoken about his childhood, after all; there's a level of mutual honesty and trust that they've happily maintained throughout their relationship. "We don't have to—"

"It's alright." Add catches her hand and presses it to his lips before she can take it away. "I'm just… worried, I guess. Never really thought about being a parent."

_Never thought that I'd be a good one,_ he doesn't say.

Ara brushes her fingers against his face, and he finds comfort in the fact that no matter how scared he is, she'll be here with him. "You're not your father, Add," she tells him. "Even if you've made mistakes, you _know_ what he did was wrong. That means you have room to grow."

"Growth is good."

"Growth is good," Ara echoes. "We don't have to talk about it anymore if you don't want to, but you know, I think I should be honest when it comes to this." She smiles wistfully, and Add melts.

(Maybe he's been thinking about this all the wrong way. Yes, he does want to pick up his kids and get to play with them and _grow_ with them. He wants them to know the joy that a childhood should have—what he never had.)

"A family," he murmurs against her knuckles. "I think we could do that pretty well."

Ara beams.

* * *

Spring passes in sunshowers and May flowers, and soon Ara is wearing chiffon sundresses and picking apples from the tree in their backyard. Add is convinced to try fishing by an overenthusiastic Chung, and they venture to Hamel for a weekend where he is brutally taught to swim after nearly drowning in the pier.

Between jars of pickled plums and salted prunes, Add finds the joy of summer. He's never been good with heat, which balances out perfectly with Ara's hate of the cold. In their home, he finds a sort of solace in summer, tending to the garden with her and spending lazy afternoons with her in his arms in the shade of their witch hazel tree. The breeze brings in leaves and petals, and Ara tells him about each and every one of them, tells him about her childhood and the things she's learned.

He wakes up with his face pressed against Ara's leg, as she sits in bed reading. The frayed edge of her nightgown brushes past his nose; he sneezes, and she startles to attention, laughing gently as she pushes away the fabric and slides back under the covers with him. "Good morning, love."

"Good morning." He kisses her forehead once, gently, as he gathers her into his arms. "Reading at this hour?"

"Just thinking about names." She gestures loosely to the book, which Add recognizes as one she took out from the library after Elesis and Rose decided on the name of their daughter. "Honore does, in fact, mean _honored_. It's Empyrean."

"That's cool," Add says. "It's like she'll always have a bit of her Empyrean side even though she was born and raised in Elrios." He pokes her nose with a playful fingertip, and she sticks her tongue out at him. "My name means _guardian of wealth_."

"Add?"

"No, Edward." A moment's repose, as she waltzes her fingertips up his collarbone and across his bare chest. "What does your name mean?"

Ara gives a little laugh, like she's got a little joke or a secret she's keeping. "Which one?"

"Right. It's a translation, isn't it."

"Close. A transliteration." This time, her smile is a lot wider. "My name in the northern tongue is _Han Aila_." The words flow from her lips like silk, a language that Add cannot hope to master. "When my mother named me, she meant for the first character to mean _love_, but there wasn't a fitting second character to match the sound and meaning. So I suppose, in a way, my name means _loved one_."

"Fitting," Add says, and kisses her softly.

They stay like that for a long time, with Ara's hair slipping from its ponytail and Add's arms wrapped around her back. "If and when," she says, just as he thinks she's falling asleep, "we have kids, what do you think we should name them?"

The question was coming, of course. He knew it was coming. "If and when we have kids, I suppose they'd have to have a name in the common tongue and one in the northern tongue," he muses. "Or maybe a transliteration, like yours."

"And would they take my last name, or yours?"

"Both, on paper." He smiles into her hair. "Maybe we can let them choose when they get older."

"That sounds fair," she says. "And how about first name? We can't transliterate everything, you know. Sometimes it sounds unpleasant."

"Then how about a name that works in both languages?" He thinks; catches the sun glinting on Ara's hair, like streams of jet on fire, and the contrast to his own silvery fringe. "How about Yin and Yang for a girl and a boy? I think it's quite fitting for us."

(They're like day and night, the two of them—Add a man of the future and of technology, and Ara the speaker of myths and legends of old. And yet they carry a piece of the other within themselves, so that they might never be separated.)

"Yin and Yang," Ara echoes with a smile. "The feminine and the masculine. I like it."

"I'm glad that you do."

The morning sun starts to signal a rise to midday, and it's so warm and comfortable that Add is about to doze off again, when Ara coughs lightly against his collarbone. "Is this a bad time to mention that I've missed my monthly?"

Add instantly snaps awake. "You've missed," he tries to say, and then stops as he considers what that means. Their time in Hamel, their time since the last time they talked about raising a family, it all comes flooding back to him. "Oh. _Oh._"

"It's not for sure," she says hastily, like it's some sort of _bad thing,_ and even though Add has his arms around her she's pushing away. "It could just be a missed cycle, it happens. We—I'm not sure of anything yet. I haven't asked Lord Eun. I haven't told Rena." She looks up, and her eyes go wide. "Love, you're crying."

Add pulls her as tightly to him as possible, and holds her. "Ara, we're going to be parents," he whispers, voice choked up as he presses his face into her shoulder. "We're going to be parents."

"That we are, love." When he finally dares to let go to look at her, Ara's face is shining with tears too. "That we are."

* * *

The first missed monthly turns into a second, and then Add is holding Ara's hair as she gasps for air over the washbasin and Rena scolds them with a playful twinkle in her eyes. Their friends all swing by to congratulate them, and Add can't help but notice with amusement that for once there's no alcohol among the gifts that they bring.

The pair of names they chose turn out to be perfect—they ask for Eun's blessing, and the millennium fox goes the extra mile to tell them that they're expecting twins. A girl and a boy, _phoenix-and-dragon_ in one, and Add thanks all the gods he knows by name that life has gone this way. Yin and Yang Grenore: their names are chiselled out onto little wooden bassinets that lie on either side of the big bed that their parents share. Add spends hours childproofing their home and spoiling Ara like there's no tomorrow.

A letter from Lu comes in the mail a few weeks later. It's cleverly phrased as an invitation, but there's a distress in her tone of writing. Something is happening under her new reign in Varnimyr, an ancient danger she can't quell alone, and she needs their help. Add scans the paper with a UV light while Ara reads over his shoulder, and he can't help but sigh and put the light down.

"I don't want to say it," he murmurs, grasping onto her hand, "it would be unfair of me to. But it's dangerous out there."

Ara squeezes his fingers. "I know," she whispers. "I really shouldn't go. I _can't_ go."

So Add kisses her goodbye at the door, lets his fingers linger on the creases in her gown that run over her abdomen. He's got a family to come back to, now, and he doesn't intend to let them down. "Don't be gone for too long," Ara laughs, her forehead still pressed against his. "I'll be right here waiting."

It's the first time Add's been away from Ara for longer than a few days since they got married. _It's like a business trip,_ he muses as Raven steps away from the fire he's built. He hasn't been travelling for a while either, not since the honeymoon. The nostalgia of campfires and foreign foods returns in full, and everywhere he goes, Add drinks in sights to tell Ara about. The falling of leaves in Feita. The sunrise over the waves in Hamel. The wind over the dunes of Sander.

They follow Lu's instructions, approaching the edge of oblivion in Lanox to an abandoned underground demon base. "This is where they must have entered Elrios in the first place," Aisha murmurs as she sets up the sigils. The portal flares to life, and the black hole of the realm of Henir begins to drag Add in.

"Well, no time like the present." Elsword rummages in his pockets, takes out a large shard of El, and tosses it into his lantern. The ghastly glow of purity against the un-light of the portal is haunting. "Let's go, guys."

Add steps into the portal—

A woman's voice. A child's scream. A body, covered in gaping wounds like bloody abysses. The scratching of claws, tearing at too-soft skin and too-small hands. The gasp of air, a final word: _you must go on._ Add flounders, and takes another step—

The lives come flooding back like raging water, an ocean upon oceans turning his blood to ice. Everything he thought he'd forgotten, thought he'd suppressed, it rears its ugly head in way, laughing in the tongue of cruel gods. Ara dies in Elrianode, in Elysion, in Lanox, in Sander, in Hamel. Ara's life bleeds out in front of him, and he can't do anything.

The passageway between worlds grows dark, and something in him vaguely recalls the need to keep going, _keep going._ He shuts his eyes, but the hands claw at his ankles all the more, and when he has the cowardice to look back there is a single bloodstained girl, black hair dipped crimson, standing broken in the middle of the path. Between the tear streaks and the void of her eyes, he can make out the words: _this isn't the answer._

Add steps out from the portal, back into the familiar blasting warmth of Varnimyr. A gust of lifeless wind brings nothing but red dust. It's been so long that it feels stranger now.

"Hey." Elsword puts a hand on his shoulder, and it's almost shocking to see how much the younger man seems to have aged in an instant. "Are you doing okay?"

"Yeah." Add offers him a snarky smile. "Just a little dazed."

(The blood on his hands won't go away.)

* * *

The mission in Varnimyr doesn't take too long, as Lu's ascension crisis is completely subverted once they're able to find the root of it. Stirbargen isn't executed for his crimes; rather, Lu makes him her advisor of war, reinstalling him in the position of power he once held. It's barely two weeks before the El Search Party is at the portal again, waiting for Lu to open the arcane circle that lets them return home.

Add travels alone back to the house on the edge of the woods, and spends a good few minutes picking apples in the yard before he cracks open the front door. Ara is kneading dough in the kitchen, and he drops the apples off on the table and hugs her from behind, drawing out a squeal.

"You're home!" Ara laughs, and Add is so, _so_ in love with her when she clutches him tightly with her hands still dusted with flour. "You should have told me! I haven't gotten to finish making dinner for the two of us yet."

"All the better for me to help you," Add says, and drops another train of kisses against the nape of her neck.

They make dinner together, as they always do. Add chops vegetables and tells Ara about the world outside their little home, tells her about the places he's been and the things they've done. He shows her the souvenirs he's brought back for her: a pressed leaf from Feita, a corked tube of colourful sand. She kisses him after each one, delighted with the candies and the books but more so by the sights he's brought home.

He's scrubbing the dried sauce off a bowl when Ara starts humming by the sink, and even though Ara always hums when they're washing dishes together, somehow this just feels wrong. Words start to flow into the tune without him even noticing: _moonlight, stars shine, let your glow go on._ The sinking feeling in his stomach returns from the void of the portal, except this time it sings to him in the dying voice of a girl in white silk.

"Love?" Ara is there in an instant, kneels beside him as his head reels. "Oh, goodness, you just got back. You should be resting."

"I'm fine," he croaks, even though he is clearly not. The world sways, and then Ara is guiding him to bed, sitting down next to him to brush the hair from his face, and then he knows no more.

He catches a cold within the day, and Ara fusses and puts blankets around his shoulders and a mug of hot tea in his hands. The lemon and ginger and honey soothe his throat, but they do nothing to quell the nightmares. Within the fortnight he's feverish, and even Rena can only say that it must be a side effect of his trip to Varnimyr. _Energy sickness,_ she calls it, and Add is reminded painfully that he really is less than human.

The winter withers through their front door, and then the mail comes: a distress message, from Elesis and Rose. Something has followed them back from Henir, flooding into their world like a plague. A few show up from Eve before Altera goes cold. Lu's last correspondence arrives scorched by turquoise flames. Even though the war has ended, a new one has been delivered right to their doorstep unnoticed.

And all through it, Add is terribly, horribly ill. The waking world isn't much better than the world of the fever dreams, so he stays asleep. He knows it's awfully selfish of him to do when Ara has to care for him and their children, but there's no strength in his limbs to even lift a finger, much less get out of bed. Sometimes, in his waking moments, he can bring himself to utter her name as she presses a beatific hand against his forehead, just to savour those few moments of her smile.

It's as though as he gets sicker, so does the world around them. The grass grows all sickly yellow, and the last of the apple harvest falls off before it can mature. Aisha appears at their front door one day, looking like she just walked through a hurricane, and casts a ward over their home before she disappears into thin air again, leaving only the message _the others still need to be protected._ The monsters from the void come, and Ara tells Add about them from her perch by the window, keeping her voice serene so that he can't hear the way she trembles.

It won't last. Soon, it won't be safe in Elrios anymore. Elesis and Rose have skipped to Empyrean with their daughter, hoping to escape the worst of it and fortify the other nation before the invasion can come. Rena has taken Raven and their children to the elven lands. The borders of Altera have been closed off with giant tsunami walls, a desperate bid for security.

And Add lies in bed staring at the clock on the wall, and wonders which tick will spell his end.

* * *

Hope wanes like the moon. Their food stores are starting to show signs of being empty, but neither of them can afford to hold back, not when he's as fragile as glass and she carries the precious gift of life within her. The rain falls in sheets; the snow falls like sand.

Something like a heartbeat pounds in Add's head, beating out a primordial rhythm that whispers in slithering tongues at his earside. The fire crackles by his earside, warm and comforting, a moment of repose in the roaring rivers of his head—

Add freezes. There's no fireplace in the room he shares with Ara, and the one in the living room is too far away to be heard. He forces himself to sit up, and gapes at the turquoise flames that flicker at the window. A war cry echoes in the distance; someone laughs like metal grating on stone.

Every bone in his body screams in pain, but he can't stay put. He throws the blankets off, tosses some shoes on, anything really, and in his stupour he finds his cloud of dynamos and runs into the kitchen.

"Ara," he yells, and his chest heaves with a burden too ancient. "Ara, they've found us. The Henir monsters—Lady Landar too—the house is on fire, Ara."

She's too small, too caught off guard, and for perhaps the first time in his life _(this life)_ Ara looks _scared_. "The ward didn't hold?" She purses her lips. "No. The ward wouldn't protect us from the fire."

"We need to run," he croaks, grabbing her hand. The fire is starting to lap at their front door now, so they escape through the back, each pounding footstep threatening to split Add's head into a million pieces. The dynamos whirl around them in a protective circle, generating wind in a desperate bid to fight off the flames, but there's no escape.

_We need water,_ Add thinks, and pulls Ara closer. If they have to go somewhere, it will be the stream. He doesn't know how long it'll provide safety, but it'll be better than being left to the flames. He pushes and slashes through the bushes, and it hurts to see the forest burn and be trampled underground but he has to make it, has to make sure he can get Ara to the stream.

"No," he murmurs as they trickle to a stop by what once was the stream, and is now just a dry trough in the mud. "No, this can't be it. Where has the water gone?"

And Ara—brave, heroic, selfless, loving _Ara_—bares her teeth and swings her arm out and her spear materializes in her hand, and she looks back at him with fire and love and Eun like snow in her hair, and she says "I'll fight for us, love," and Add can only watch in horror as she stares down the incoming onslaught of the void monsters—

They approach, and Ara turns into a bird-of-prey, flying through the air to plunge her spear into some awful body of Henir, and her silks billow up around her like wings but even the most beautiful of wings can stop beating, and then the void creature snarls and Add _moves_ but it's not fast enough and the blade passes cleanly through her back and out her abdomen as time stands still for the being that can run away from time.

And Add—cowardly, foolish, selfish, loving Add—he screams and his dynamos _scatter_ through the air, and the electric field pushes all the monsters of Henir out, away from this precious spot in the once-stream that is theirs, _was_ theirs. "Ara," he chokes, falling to his knees by her side as she crumples, Eun's influence disappearing in an instant. "Ara, no, please, _don't leave me_—"

"Add, love—" She coughs, and blood splatters her face and his. "I'm so sorry."

"What are you sorry for, I _failed _you, I—"

The hand on his face is gentle. "I'm so sorry," Ara whispers, with that beatific smile of hers, so serene and precious. Even as he struggles to staunch the bleeding, _why won't it stop,_ the light is fading from her eyes. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry."

Her hand drops.

Add screams until his voice goes hoarse and the world scatters like sand, and it all turns to black.

* * *

**A/N: so it's been four months and i am so incredibly sorry for disappearing. i am also sorry for the contents of this chapter. it was physically difficult to write towards the end! **

**but it was also very hard to write the middle, especially the wedding and the honeymoon and falling in love. i've gotten so used to heavy action and heavy introspection that it was a welcome break to write something fluffy, albeit a difficult one. it was also really fun to experiment with settings for the house and the seaside town. i'm a huge fan of paella personally but it is very difficult to make when you don't have the right rice or saffron for that matter**

**as always i'm a sucker for slow dances, and so i had to choose music for this chapter. the first dance at Raven and Rena's wedding is set to _May It Be_ from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, sung by Enya, while the first dance at Add and Ara's wedding is set to _Endless Love_ by Lionel Richie and Diana Ross.**

**i am also going to announce that there is Absolutely going to be no update on december 1st, for the reason that i'm doing nanowrimo this year! i'm going to try and keep up regular monthly updates after that though so please stay tuned!**

**i love you all, peace**

**~Marg**


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